A procedural milestone most employers will never hear about closes this week, and it is worth five minutes of attention if your business holds, or is working toward, ISO 45001 certification. On 8 September 2026 the Draft International Standard ballot for the revision of ISO 45001, the international occupational health and safety management systems standard, closes to national standards bodies around the world [1][2]. That is not the end of the revision. It is the point at which the structure and intent of the new standard are considered largely settled, with the detail still open to refinement before publication, which is expected midway through 2027 [1][3].
Why a ballot closing matters more than it sounds
ISO's development process moves a draft through stages of increasing formality: committee draft, then Draft International Standard, then Final Draft International Standard, then publication [2]. The DIS ballot that closes this week allows national member bodies, in South Africa's case represented through the SABS mirror committee, to review the text, submit comments and vote on whether it proceeds [1]. Once a DIS ballot passes, the settled position among the bodies tracking the revision is that the main themes are unlikely to shift significantly, even though wording will still be refined at the FDIS stage that follows [1][3]. In practical terms, this week is closer to the point where an organisation can start planning against the new standard than it is to a stage where the direction might still change.
What the draft already tells us to expect
The certification bodies tracking the revision have converged on a consistent set of themes likely to carry through to ISO 45001:2027 [1][3]. Psychosocial health and wellbeing moves from a peripheral consideration to a more central one, addressing stress and workplace culture rather than only physical hazard. Climate related risk is expected to enter the standard as a factor affecting worker safety, following the pattern set by ISO's other recent management system revisions. The standard is expected to address hybrid and digital ways of working directly, an area the 2018 version, written before large scale remote and platform based work, does not speak to. Expectations around supply chain and outsourced activity are set to tighten, so a certified organisation's OHS obligations will extend more visibly to its contractors. Leadership accountability is expected to be strengthened rather than merely restated, and the revision is expected to recognise workforce diversity, including gender related differences in safety and health outcomes, an area ISO has flagged as a priority across its standards portfolio [1][3].
None of these themes should surprise anyone who has followed the parallel development of ISO 45003, the psychosocial risk guidance standard, which entered its own five year systematic review earlier in 2026. The direction of travel across ISO's health and safety work is consistent: from a standard that manages physical hazard toward one that manages the full range of factors that determine whether people are safe and well at work.
What South African employers should do now, not in 2027
The organisations that will find the eventual transition straightforward are the ones treating this ballot closing as the starting gun, not the finish line. A transition period of roughly three years is expected once the standard is published, following the pattern of the recent ISO 9001:2026 and ISO 14001:2026 revisions [1]. Three years sounds generous until it is measured against how long a genuine change to psychosocial risk management, supply chain oversight or leadership accountability actually takes to embed, rather than merely document.
The practical starting point is a gap assessment against the themes above, run now, against the current management system rather than a future one. Where does the current OHS management system address psychosocial risk, and is that a written control or an assumption. Where does climate exposure, extreme heat, flooding, air quality, already intersect with existing hazard identification, even if it has never been labelled that way. What does the current system actually require of contractors and subcontractors, and does that requirement have evidence behind it. These are not new questions created by the revision. They are questions the revision will formalise into an audit criterion, and a business that has already answered them is adjusting a system it runs. A business that has not will be answering them for the first time under audit pressure, on someone else's timeline.
Abbreviations
- DIS: Draft International Standard
- FDIS: Final Draft International Standard
- ISO: International Organization for Standardization
- OHS: Occupational Health and Safety
- SABS: South African Bureau of Standards
References
- LRQA, "ISO 45001 revision update: DIS ballot opening soon", 2026. https://www.lrqa.com/en/latest-news/iso-45001-revision-update-dis-ballot-opening-soon/
- International Organization for Standardization, "ISO/DIS 45001 (Occupational health and safety management systems)", life cycle stage 40.20, DIS ballot initiated 16 Jun 2026 for 12 weeks, accessed 02 Sep 2026. https://www.iso.org/standard/89698.html
- DNV, "Draft version of ISO 45001 released", 2026. https://www.dnv.com/news/2026/draft-version-of-iso-45001-released/
Last updated: 02 Sep 2026