Organisations operating under ISO 45001 standards face a constant challenge: how to genuinely safeguard worker wellbeing when traditional approaches rely heavily on surveys, gut instinct, and post-incident analysis. The standard's people-related requirements demand a proactive, data-driven culture where organisations can identify risks, empower workers, and continuously improve their occupational health and safety systems. Enter Solas OS, an AI-driven talent operating system that transforms how organisations understand and manage the human elements of workplace safety.
By analysing everyday workplace signals, including communication patterns, collaboration networks, and how work actually gets done, Solas OS provides the behavioural insights needed to meet ISO 45001's most demanding clauses. Here's how.
1. Clause 5.4: Consultation and Participation of Workers
The requirement: ISO 45001 demands that organisations establish processes to consult and involve workers, including their representatives, in occupational health and safety matters.
What Solas OS does: The platform maps communication patterns and collaboration networks across your organisation, identifying informal influence networks and trusted voices within teams. This reveals who workers actually listen to and where genuine engagement is happening, enabling HR and safety teams to identify authentic representatives rather than relying on formal titles alone.
Why behavioural data wins: Traditional consultation approaches often defaulted to hierarchical representatives or annual safety committees. Solas OS shows you the real power brokers and opinion leaders in your workforce. If your safety message is being championed by a respected peer rather than just management, adoption and participation rates skyrocket. You're not guessing at who influences worker behaviour; you're seeing it in real time through collaboration patterns and communication flows.
2. Clause 7.2: Competence
The requirement: The organisation must ensure that persons doing work are competent, including through suitable recruitment, training, and experience.
What Solas OS does: The system identifies competence gaps by analysing how individuals collaborate, contribute to discussions, and execute their responsibilities. It surfaces emerging talent, flags individuals struggling with their current role, and highlights expertise pockets that might otherwise remain hidden. This enables targeted upskilling and better role-matching.
Why behavioural data wins: Competence assessments traditionally rely on qualifications, supervisor ratings, and annual reviews. These miss crucial nuances. Solas OS reveals whether someone has the competence in practice by observing how they work. Someone might have excellent credentials but struggle with applied problem-solving, or vice versa. By understanding actual workplace behaviour, you can invest development resources where they'll have the most impact and identify potential safety risks stemming from genuine skill gaps rather than qualification mismatches.
3. Clause 7.3: Awareness
The requirement: Workers must be made aware of the occupational health and safety policy, their role and responsibilities, potential consequences of non-compliance, and relevant hazards.
What Solas OS does: The platform tracks whether safety messages are actually reaching and resonating with workers through analysis of communication patterns, message velocity, and information diffusion. It identifies silos where safety awareness is weak and highlights which teams need reinforced messaging or alternative communication approaches.
Why behavioural data wins: Most organisations measure awareness through compliance training completion or surveys. Solas OS shows whether awareness is actually translating into changed behaviour and internormalised understanding. If your safety communications aren't reaching night shift workers or remote teams, you'll see it immediately in the data. You can then adapt messaging, find peer champions within those groups, or adjust communication channels to ensure genuine awareness rather than box-ticking compliance.
4. Clause 7.4: Communication, Especially Internal Communication Effectiveness
The requirement: Organisations must establish, implement, and maintain processes for internal and external communication relevant to occupational health and safety, ensuring information flows effectively.
What Solas OS does: Solas OS maps communication networks in granular detail, showing which channels are effective, where critical safety information gets lost, and which teams are siloed. It identifies communication breakdowns before they become incidents, revealing when important safety messages aren't reaching certain groups or when critical concerns from workers aren't reaching management.
Why behavioural data wins: Organisations typically measure communication through pulse surveys or ask whether people "feel informed." Solas OS shows what actually happened. Are safety alerts genuinely reaching shift workers? Is the near-miss reporting channel being used or ignored? Which managers are creating psychological safety for workers to raise concerns? By understanding real communication patterns rather than perceived ones, you can redesign channels and processes that genuinely work, ensuring no safety-critical information falls through the cracks.
5. Clause 6.1.2: Hazard Identification and Assessment of Risks, Particularly Psychosocial Hazards
The requirement: The organisation must identify hazards and assess risks to occupational health and safety, with explicit consideration of psychosocial hazards such as workplace stress, burnout, and interpersonal conflict.
What Solas OS does: The system identifies psychosocial risk factors through analysis of collaboration patterns, workload distribution, communication stress indicators, and team dynamics. It flags emerging burnout risks, spots excessive workload concentration, reveals conflict patterns, and highlights teams experiencing psychological distress long before these become formal complaints or incidents.
Why behavioural data wins: Traditional hazard assessment relies on checklists, incident reports, and annual risk reviews. Psychosocial hazards are particularly difficult to capture this way because workers often don't report them formally until they've become severe. Solas OS detects the early warning signs: sudden changes in communication patterns, isolation within teams, collaboration network shifts, or stress indicators in how work is being done. You're not waiting for someone to say they're burnt out; you're seeing the behavioural markers that suggest burnout is developing. This enables preventative intervention rather than reactive crisis management.
6. Clause 9.1: Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis and Evaluation
The requirement: The organisation must establish processes to monitor, measure, analyse, and evaluate occupational health and safety performance through relevant metrics and data.
What Solas OS does: The platform provides continuous, real-time monitoring of workforce wellbeing and safety culture indicators through daily workplace signals. Rather than relying on monthly or annual metrics, it tracks changes in collaboration patterns, communication effectiveness, psychological safety indicators, and cultural shifts as they happen. This data feeds into organisational dashboards and reporting systems.
Why behavioural data wins: Traditional measurement approaches depend on lagging indicators: accident rates, near-miss reports, sickness absence. By the time you see these metrics, the problem has already materialised. Solas OS provides leading indicators grounded in actual workplace behaviour. You can see cultural shifts, emerging team dysfunction, or changes in psychological safety weeks or months before they show up in incident statistics. This transforms occupational health and safety from reactive firefighting to proactive management, with measurable improvements in outcomes.
7. Clause 10.3: Continual Improvement
The requirement: The organisation must continually improve the occupational health and safety management system, taking into account results of evaluation, consultation with workers, and changing circumstances.
What Solas OS does: By providing continuous insights into workforce behaviour and safety culture, Solas OS creates the data foundation for genuine continual improvement. It shows which safety initiatives are actually working, which interventions aren't landing, and how the organisation's culture is evolving. This enables iterative, evidence-based refinement of safety systems rather than guesswork.
Why behavioural data wins: Continual improvement typically happens through annual reviews, management discussion, and occasional worker surveys. Solas OS enables monthly or quarterly iterations. You can test a new safety communication approach, measure its effectiveness in real time through behaviour change, and refine it immediately. You can implement a workload rebalancing initiative and see within weeks whether it's actually reducing stress indicators. This agile, data-driven approach to improvement means your ISO 45001 system becomes progressively more effective and genuinely responsive to worker needs rather than static and compliance-focused.
Closing: From Compliance to Culture
ISO 45001 compliance is fundamentally about creating organisations where workers are genuinely safe, informed, and empowered. Traditional compliance approaches, such as ticking boxes, holding annual reviews, and waiting for incidents, often fail to deliver this. Solas OS represents a paradigm shift: by analysing the everyday signals that reveal how your organisation actually works, you gain insight into occupational health and safety that goes far deeper than any checklist.
The result is not just compliance, but a safety culture grounded in real understanding of your workforce's needs, risks, and potential. That's the future of occupational health and safety management.