FlourishDx Academy | ISO 45003 Training

ISO 45003 is the internationally agreed standard for psychological health and safety at work. It details how companies can take a best practice approach to workplace mental health through the lens of risk management and continuous improvement (essentially it is an ISO mental health standard). The full name of the standard is ISO 45003:2021 Occupational health and safety management — Psychological health and safety at work — Guidelines for managing psychosocial risks.

ISO 45003 is a child standard of ISO 45001. While ISO 45001 is the international standard for health and safety management systems, ISO 45003 extends this to additional considerations required for effective psychosocial risk management and supporting systems.

While there is no such thing as the 'ISO psychology standard' (or an ISO mental health standard for that matter), there is a specific standard for psychological health and safety at work called ISO 45003. ISO 45003 details how an organisation can take a risk management approach to prevent psychological harm to workers and create the conditions for mental wellbeing through consultation, management commitment, and cycles of continuous improvement. The full name of the standard is ISO 45003:2021 Occupational health and safety management — Psychological health and safety at work — Guidelines for managing psychosocial risks.

There is no such thing as risk assessment psychology’ per se. However, risk assessment is commonly applied by psychologists to determine the potential for harm at individual or group level. ISO 45003 details a management system approach for practicing psychosocial risk management. That is, consulting with workers to determine their experience of work (psychosocial factors) and identifying the likelihood and consequence of harm due to the severity, frequency and duration of exposure to psychosocial hazards (and their interactions).

Psychosocial risk assessment is the process of determining the liklihood and consequence that harm will occur to workers due to exposure to psychosocial hazards. Psychosocial risk assessment helps to identify priority groups of workers and associated psychosocial hazards to address through elimination of psychosocial hazards or reduction in psychosocial risk through the application of suitable psychosocial risk controls (typically work re-design).

Employee mental health software differs in terms of focus and utility. FlourishDx uniquely incorporates tools for consulting with employees at scale to determine how their experience of work is related to positive or negative outcomes (e.g. burnout, job satisfaction, turnover intention etc.), then systematically identify work design actions to improve and monitor the work environment for psychosocial hazards and risks. As an employee mental health software platform, it offers significant utility for administrators, line managers and frontline workers.

In addition to the free ISO 45003 education provided through the FlourishDx Academy, FlourishDx offers an end-to-end service for organisations looking to adopt or mature their approach to psychological health and safety. This can include consulting services such as gap analysis against the ISO 45003 standard, strategic advice for ISO 45003 adoption, or use of FlourishDx's enterprise-grade technology platform to operationalise the ISO 45003 standard and consult with workers at scale.