Completing regular audits is necessary in a retail environment that changes based on stock levels, the actions and activities of your visiting public, seasonal promotions and staff availability.
Our focus, when providing the tools to complete checks, audits and risk assessments, is to work with you to capture the format you need and make it fit your places and people. Part of this process is knowing whether the safety and standards audits that your teams will be completing will be scheduled, who they will be assigned to (by role) or whether they will be created ad-hoc when required.
Restricted audit completion – no overlap
We know, from years of experience in the sector, that sometimes there is a need to make sure that an audit, risk assessment or checklist is the only one of that type being completed at a specific location at a point in time; that there is no overlap and that one is signed off as complete before another instance is created. This is especially true for Fire Risk Assessments and Open/Close routines.
Especially as with this sort of audit you need a point in time marker of which result is the most recent version and what all the most up-to date risks are. These are also the sort of Audits that can be automatically scheduled so that they are completed exactly when they need to be. For this, our compliance and performance management system can be configured to generate an instance of these audits on a strict schedule, delivered directly to the VPA (read more about the VPA here) of anyone who has the authority to complete it. This provides a very clear responsibility structure for where, when and who should be completing audits, especially those that are fundamental to a robust health and safety routine.
Importantly, providing a schedule of auto-generated audits also gives immediate visibility of what isn’t being done. No longer can an audit be skipped without ramifications, there will be a clear record, online and accessible by the Health and Safety team at any time. Following up with locations as to why audits were skipped opens opportunities for improvements and a culture of feedback and growth.
Overlapping results – just say so
There will also be other times where an audit or check needs to be less restricted – those that need to be opened when required and might even be undertaken simultaneously by multiple people in a venue. When the results of an audit wouldn’t contradict each other that particular template can be flagged so that it can have multiple instances open at once. For example, these safety or compliance check templates could be used for departmental audits where the same template is used in multiple areas of the store simultaneously – the same questions are asked but each check is completed by different managers, potentially at exactly the same time.
In our experience, these types of checks are used for observations of people doing tasks, fire extinguisher checks, or in locations with multiple floors where the same questions apply but any qualified colleague could complete the check.
How to decide?
Our approach is always to work with you, to tailor our tools to your business needs – if you’re already confident that your audits are accurate but you need an up-to-date digital delivery system, you are only a conversation away from having your own Inform People compliance and performance management system set up and all your planned and ad-hoc audits digitised, accessible and trackable from your office, home or on-the-go.
Would Inform People be the right fit for you? Let’s find out! Contact us directly through our form, email or phone. We can’t wait to hear from you.
