With coronavirus cases falling, office-based work is making a comeback in the UK. In England, the government is no longer telling people to work from home where possible, and Scotland will be following suit next week. Working from home is still recommended in Northern Ireland, and at time of writing, it remains a requirement in Wales - although this will move "from law to guidance" on Friday 28 January.

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The 26th UN Climate Change Conference - or COP26 for short - is currently taking place in Glasgow. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today, and this meeting of delegates from nearly 200 different countries has been touted as the world's "best last chance" to avert catastrophe.

The conference began on Sunday 31 October, and since then we've heard stirring speeches from the likes of David Attenborough, Barack Obama, and Tuvalu's foreign minister Simon Kofe, who addressed the conference while standing knee-deep in seawater.

A number of big pledges and ambitious targets have already been announced, but it's clear that we will all need to do our bit in order to limit the impact of climate change on our planet and our societies.

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A quality manual is a document that outlines an organisation's quality management system (QMS).

In the past, a company seeking ISO 9001 certification would typically keep a big folder - sometimes several big folders - full of important documents related to their QMS. This unwieldy stack of forms, procedures, policies and so forth was sometimes referred to as a 'quality manual'.

But a quality manual doesn't have to include all of those things. In fact, a quality manual can just be a single document that sets out the intent for your quality management system and how it will operate.

SEE ALSO: What is a quality manual?

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Once you have obtained ISO 9001 certification through ISO Accelerator, you will need to renew your certification once a year. This involves paying an annual recertification fee and passing a surveillance audit to prove that you are maintaining your quality management system (QMS).

If you're wondering what to expect from this annual ISO recertification audit, read on...

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If you're unfamiliar with the ISO 9000 family of standards, some of the terminology associated with ISO 9001 may seem a little confusing at first. Perhaps you're aware that ISO 9001 is some kind of management tool, but you're not quite clear on the details. You've seen the phrase 'quality management system' come up frequently in articles on this topic - so is ISO 9001 a quality management system?

We can answer that question right now: no, ISO 9001 is not a quality management system. Rather, ISO 9001 is the global standard for quality management systems (often abbreviated to QMS). The concepts are closely linked, but the terms 'ISO 9001' and 'QMS' should not be used interchangeably.

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