ISO 45001 for construction: certified online

A building site puts several firms in the same place at the same time. The client and the general contractor carry the consequences if one of them handles safety badly: stopped work, injured people, delayed handover. So they ask every subcontractor the same question before awarding the work.

The question arrives as a line in a tender, a supplier questionnaire from a purchasing department or a request during a customer audit. Some ask for an ISO 45001 certificate outright. Others accept a description of your safety organisation, and a certificate answers that faster than a ten-page reply.

For a small trade firm, the certificate also settles an unequal situation. You are compared with larger competitors who have a safety officer and a documented system. ISO 45001 gives you a recognised document that shows your own system is in place.

• About the ISO 45001 standard

The standard does not list hazards for you. It requires you to find the hazards in your own work and deal with them before someone is hurt. On a construction site, these are the usual starting points.

Work at height

Scaffolding, roof edges, ladders and openings in floors. The standard asks you to assess each task and choose controls in the right order, starting with removing the need to work at height.

Excavation and trenches

Collapse of trench walls, buried services and vehicles near the edge. These hazards are identified per site and reviewed when ground conditions change.

Lifting and site transport

Cranes, telehandlers, delivery lorries and people on foot in the same area. Traffic routes, signallers and exclusion zones are typical controls.

Machinery and power tools

Cutting, drilling and demolition equipment. Training, inspection and guarding belong to the system, not to individual habit.

Dust, noise and hazardous substances

Cutting concrete, sanding, solvents and adhesives. The harm shows up years later, so the standard asks you to look at long-term health as well as accidents.

Several trades on one site

Electricians work beneath scaffolders, plasterers behind roofers. The standard expects you to coordinate with other employers and contractors on your site.

The requirements are less abstract on site than they sound in the text of the standard. These examples show what each one can look like in a firm of 10 to 80 people.

1. 01

   Identify and assess hazards

   Before work starts, the site manager walks the site with the foreman and records the hazards of the first phase. The record is updated when the work moves from groundworks to shell or from shell to fit-out.

2. 02

   Set a policy with a commitment to prevention

   The owner signs a one-page safety policy. It hangs in the site office and is part of the induction for new employees and temporary workers.

3. 03

   Consult and involve workers

   Short safety talks before the shift, where workers can name a hazard and get an answer. A worker who sees an unprotected edge has a clear way to report it and expects it to be fixed.

4. 04

   Apply the hierarchy of controls

   Permanent edge protection comes before harnesses. A cutting table with dust extraction comes before dust masks. Personal protective equipment is the last measure, not the first.

5. 05

   Plan emergency preparedness

   Each site has a rescue plan for work at height, a named first aider, an assembly point and the address for the emergency call. The plan is practised, not just filed.

6. 06

   Investigate incidents and derive actions

   A near miss, such as a falling brick that hits no one, is recorded and discussed. The cause is found and one concrete change follows, with a person and a date.

Clause 4 sits in front of all of these. It asks you to describe your context: which projects you run, who your interested parties are and where your system applies.

You start with the online self-assessment for ISO 45001. It has 34 yes/no questions. Fourteen of them are mandatory requirements of the standard and all must be answered yes. Of the other 20, at least 14 must be yes. You can begin without an account.

Once you pass and pay, the certificate is issued within 4 hours. It is issued by G6 Agency AG under licence from SICE, and SICE reviews every assessment before issue. The PDF carries a certificate number and a QR code. A client or purchasing department scans it and lands on a public verification page.

The price is CHF 699 (€699) in the first year, then CHF 469 (€469) per year including the yearly online re-audit. The certificate is valid for 3 years. Billing is an automatic yearly subscription, and you cancel in your customer account at any time to the end of the current year. The certificate then ends with the paid year. If you certify a second standard, such as ISO 9001, you get 20% off with 2 standards and 30% with 3 or more, also on the yearly fee. Prices include 8.1% Swiss VAT for customers in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

There is no on-site audit with this route. If a client insists on the classic route with an on-site audit by a certification body, the guide on the routes shows where the two differ.

• Start the free self-assessment
• See pricing
• Compare the certification routes

The assessment asks about practice, so the best preparation is a look at your own firm. Do you have a written safety policy? Is there a record of hazards for current projects? Can you show who attended induction and training, and what happened after the last incident or near miss?

If an answer is no, you have found the gap to close before you retake the assessment. Small firms often have the practice already and lack only the paperwork. Writing it down is a matter of days, not months.

• ISO for small and medium businesses
• Certification without an on-site audit