Managing your ISO Compliance Obligations

ISO Compliance Obligations are the requirements an organisation must fulfill, including legal and other requirements related to its activities. All of the ISO Management Standards ask the same questions of a Compliance Manager in regards to legislation.

In this article, we will discuss these three questions, discussing what they require from your organisation and how you can achieve them.

 

Do you have access to the ISO Compliance Obligations related to your management system?

You will need to determine what compliance obligations apply to your business, and have access to them. This includes any applicable legal and other requirements.

Every month, we see updates to upwards of 30 to 50 items of legislation, related guidance or industry standards. These range from having a fairly insignificant impact on your organisation to being important with far reaching impacts.

For example, the Grenfell disaster caused changes to legislation, which led to impacts on businesses, products and services. Another example is online safety issues, which are also combatted with updated legislation.

So how do you stay up to date with such a large amount of new and updated requirements? Well, you can create a legal register, and use a legal update system to stay updated. For example, the ISO Compliance Register platform allows you to quickly and easily create legal registers. We keep our database up to date, which saves you from manually looking for changes to compliance obligations.

 

How do the compliance obligations apply to your organisation?

Identifying what obligations apply to your organisation is a great start. But then a new question arises: what do you need to do about it?

While there is a lot of legislation, the great thing is that there’s also a lot of guidance. Some legislation is very clear in their requirements of what you need to do, too.

Some legislation is less clear, making it harder to identify actions to take. In ICR, we create typical tasks that can be viewed alongside the legislation. However, you know your business best – it’s important to look at more detailed information to ensure all necessary action is taken.

 

Are you taking these obligations into account to improve your management system?

You should be using the compliance registers you’ve created for continual improvement within your management system. Be sure to share your registers with your team and use the Plan Do Check Act cycle to implement changes. Use audits or register reviews to review and record the changes and actions taken.

 

With these three questions answered, you’re well on your way with managing your compliance obligations!

We designed ISO Compliance Register with compliance managers in mind. It’s the affordable solution for managing a range of different ISO standards. Click here to discover our website, and contact us for your free demonstration of our online compliance management platform.