GRI 403 is a new occupational health and safety reporting standard from the Global Reporting Initiative. In this week’s blog at Project Skills Solutions, we have a look at GRI 403 to find out what it is and also how it will impact health and safety at work.
The new occupational health and safety reporting standard – GRI 403 – was released last week and is expected to further enhance the way safety is reported and maintained in the workplace.
Even though workplace safety has improved hugely over the years, there is a lot that is still left to do and GRI 403 has been designed to address this.
In the blog this week we are going to explain what GRI 403 is, what is means for remote workers specifically and also how you can find out more information about it.
What is GRI 403?
The Global Reporting Initiative is the international independent standards organization that assists businesses, governments and other organizations in reporting on their impact with climate change, corruption, human rights and health and safety.
GRI 403 has been a long time in the making. It sets out best practice for reporting on occupational health and safety particularly in relation to society, the environment and the economy.
The initiative places great emphasis on consulting workers within an organisations overall health and safety policy. This is something that we have blogged about before – 3 Methods To Improve Your Safety Culture At Work – and workers’ health and wellbeing (both physically and mentally) is highlighted throughout.
What does it mean for remote workers?
One area that GRI 403 is very specific about is in relation to self-employed and remote workers.
It comes off the back of an IOSH research report – Out of Sight, Out of Mind – which found that 129.5 million workers in Western Europe spent some or most of their working week away from a central work location. It means that they are harder to manage not only due to having more than one location of work but also because there is less frequent contact and reduced access to information from the organisation.
GR 403 states that any worker who is controlled by an organisation or if that organisations controls their workplace should be included in the reporting data regardless if they are volunteers, contractors, individuals or even self-employed.
How to find out more information on GRI 403
You can read the entire GRI 403 document on this link and if you want something a bit more interactive, there is a 20 minute presentation about its key points here.
Additionally there are 2 live webinars taking place on the 20th September 2018 that you can be involved in that will cover GRI 403 as well as a Q&A session with the Global Reporting Initiative. The first is at 9am (CEST) on 20th September 2018 and the second will take place at 4PM CEST on the same date and you can register through the above links.
