Let's Talk about ISO 14001 Clause 5.3 Organizational roles, responsibilities and authorities

In this article, I’m going to cover clause 5.3 Organizational roles, responsibilities, and authorities. I’m going to break this clause down and turn it into something you can all understand. You’ll then be able to apply this to your own organization's system and understand what the requirements will look like for you. No more guessing!

Keep on reading as I can show you just how easy this is and what I think the keyword is in this clause! Without this keyword, the requirements can be challenging to meet. So stick with me.

The overarching or leading statement in this clause is:

Top Management shall ensure that the responsibilities and authorities for relevant roles are assigned and communicated within the organization.

There are those words again ‘Top Management’ – let me remind you who this is. The official definition for top management is … "the person or group of people who directs and controls an organization at the highest level. I always say that top management is the decision maker". Depending on the structure and size of the business, top management could be the owners, shareholders, board of directors, general manager, or even a project manager if the scope of the system is down to a project level only.

Now that we’re clear with who top management is again let’s look back at what this clause says – it says that the responsibilities and authorities for relevant roles are assigned – so delegated, given to someone who has responsibility for them – and communicated – so this could mean that these responsibilities and authorities are shared within the organization so everyone is aware who is responsible for what. This communication could be part of induction and training, or it could simply be available to view within the business like in position descriptions or organizational charts.

Remember though that this clause doesn’t say ‘you shall maintain position descriptions and organizational charts’ – it just says to assign and communicate. I’ve just given you an idea of what I normally see out there that businesses put together to meet this requirement – and that is position descriptions and org charts.

Now on top of this general requirement, this clause has 2 specific responsibilities that top management is to assign and give authority to. These specific responsibilities and authorities all relate to the environmental management system.

They are:

a) ensuring that the environmental management system conforms to the requirements of this International Standard.

Now, this just means that there is to be someone responsible and with authority to monitor and check that the system is being followed. This could be through internal audits or scheduled operational reviews. Whatever the business determines the monitoring and evaluation requirements are and how these will be performed.

And then there is point b) which states that there is also to be

reporting on the performance of the environmental management system, including environmental performance, to top management.

This makes sense as obviously if you are monitoring whether the environmental management system conforms to the standard then there would have to be some objective reporting provided to top management to demonstrate the status of the system – is it conforming? Is it not? Where are the areas that it can improve? And so on.

Now, to finish off I wanted to point out that the other thing that stands out for me with this clause is the word ‘authority’ – yes, this is the word I mentioned was key to these requirements.

You may have noted that the clause mentions responsibilities but, in each instance, it also mentions ‘authority’. You can have responsibility without the authority, however, when it comes to a management system and being responsible for conformance, maintenance, integrity, and reporting – without the authority to do this it becomes very difficult to gain traction and most importantly implement change and improvement.

I have seen this so many times in businesses. They have given this responsibility to a team member however they do not have the responsibility to issue findings or put forward changes and reinforce these changes with other workers. They are just scoffed at and taken far too lightly. When this happens, nothing changes and the system stagnates, or moreso declines.

When you are looking at delegating and giving others responsibilities, also look at the authority you are giving them.

This is the important part to ensure is assigned and communicated within the organization as well as externally where it is relevant.

Check out what qualifications we offer for ISO 14001 over on our website now!