Workplace safety is an essential part of running any business. A safe workplace leads to increased productivity, efficiency, and profitability. A safety audit is the most thorough approach for an organisation to assess the efficiency, effectiveness, and compliance of its complete health and safety management system. 

Safety audits can spot and fix oversights that, if left unchecked, might lead to expensive and catastrophic workplace injuries or deaths, ensuring that an organisation stays in compliance with internal business and government regulations. 

If you are committed to workplace safety, you must regularly improve your safety guidelines.  In this post, we’ll look at why safety audits are essential for your company and what you need to include in your safety plan and procedures. 

Safety Audit Definition  

A safety audit is a planned, objective, detailed, and systematic method for assessing the success level of a health and safety management system. It requires gathering information, evaluating it, and comparing the results to the organisation’s health and safety objectives and best practices. 

A safety audit evaluates the efficiency, effectiveness, and trustworthiness of a company’s complete health and safety management system. It helps identify potential safety hazards before they become problems and catalyses essential adjustments to enhance employee safety. 

Safety Audit Key Components  

It is essential to ensure that your organisation is ready for an audit, whether scheduled or unexpected, to prevent fines, penalties, violations, and bad sentiment. A safety audit may help uncover possible compliance gaps or opportunities for improvement before a visit by regulatory authorities. Although preparing for an audit could seem like a huge task, Inform People’s audit software can assist in making the process as straightforward as possible. 

The steps outlined below provide the components for developing an effective safety audit. 

Audit Planning  

The audit plan is the underlying documentation of “who, what, and where.” The planning is a critical component of the whole process since the audit plan outlines the procedures and establishes the safety test baseline. 

• The “Who” refers to the auditee with specialised safety experience who has been instructed to accomplish the task. Once defined, this would be applied across the business via the permission structure on Inform People.  
• The “What” refers to the audit scope, which includes all defined tasks, checklists, and assessment guidelines required to accomplish a successful audit. Once an audit template is written, it can be created immediately when needed or scheduled as tasks on Inform People’s compliance and performance management software. 
• The “Where” might contain the designation of specific locations in the workplace to audit. For example, only venues with a lift would need to complete a lift inspection.  

Audit Execution  

The audit execution must go beyond “checking the checklist” using a pass/fail approach. The context should be established to tell everyone participating that safety audits are a tool for tracking progress toward specified safety objectives and gathering employee feedback as part of a continuous improvement process. 

Compile the Audit Report  

Following the audit, the auditor will compile test findings and information into a brief audit report. 

Part of the training includes ensuring a well-documented report that outlines any discrepancies from the audit baseline and significant audit results and describes what is working and any critical areas of concern. Potential problems or unfavourable findings are addressed in the audit report and recommended actions section to start the necessary process improvement. 

Set Corrective Action Plans and Process Improvement 

The results should focus on improving processes that help achieve appropriate workplace safety. Although audit results may reveal critical corrective actions that must be implemented immediately for employee safety, most baseline changes and employee participation are handled as part of continuous process improvement. 

Following up on process improvement would include prioritising tasks, assigning them, and setting deadlines. 

Communicate Results  

All employees must clearly understand the audit and their current safety status. Employees have received safety training, and adherence to those processes is critical in reducing incidents in the workplace. 

The effective sharing of audit findings raises awareness of the company’s safety initiatives and the collaborative safety achievements of managers and leadership involvement. The audit findings confirm that the organisation has invested in an effective safety programme to eliminate accidents and mitigate risk. 

Key Elements of a Safety Audit  

Organisations must conduct safety audits following general best practices to get valuable insights from safety audits. The following are the critical elements of any successful safety audit: 

Consistent regularity  

The areas that pose the most safety hazards should be audited regularly, and you should establish a schedule for conducting them. 

It is important to emphasise that safety audits are not the same as regular facility inspections. Facility safety inspections for dangers and control should be conducted more often, with supervisors doing them weekly and management performing them monthly. These too can be recorded within the Inform People Audit module, however.  

Competent and objective auditors  

A safety audit can only be as competent as those who conduct it, which is why it is important to entrust the process to people who have the relevant knowledge and experience. Organisations should create safety audit teams of three to five personnel well-versed in current safety regulations, especially to carry out the most in-depth business audits. 

These personnel must be knowledgeable of all applicable health and safety legislation and other standards, as well as trained in the practice of identifying violations and hazards. Untrained employees should never inspect their work surroundings to maintain objectivity. Managers can carry out audits without having to send a specialised team around every location, especially in businesses big enough to have 100s of venues. An outsider might better at recognising faults that a supervisor or section manager may have missed so depending on the scale of your audit, consider who will complete it. 

Advanced Preparation  

Those performing the audit and being audited should be fully prepared for the situation.  

• A week before a workplace safety audit, the organisation should notify all involved managers and supervisors that all records, documents, and procedures must be ready and accessible before the audit starts. 
• The safety audit team should review all previous programmes, area audits, corrective action plans, and any business, local, state, and government standards relevant to the programme.  
• Reviewing documents, inspection, and training requirements may also be beneficial.  
• The audit scope should be established ahead of time, considering accident and inspection reports and feedback from different management. 

Thorough Record-keeping  

Extensive records are both a required and the goal of safety audits. A safety audit team should review all reports for the section they are auditing to determine where possible issue areas are most likely to happen and whether the correct processes are being followed, and to diagnose where improvements can be made for increased efficiency. 

Competent reports allow auditors to conduct more focused assessments to identify issues. Fortunately, digitising data improves the record-keeping process. A digital audit is automatically stored in the effective cloud of the VPA and therefore is accessible to the auditing team from anywhere and is not just locked to the person who completed it. Scores are calculated automatically and reporting allows an easy top-down view of which locations have scored highly and those that have reported issues that need attention. Plus, they can complete a follow up audit after remediation is taken to get their score back up. 

Perceptive Data Analysis  

After evaluating all documentation, documented plans, procedures, work practises, and equipment, the safety audit teams should filter through the information to provide a concise report that covers all aspects of the programme.  

All safety audit comments, recommendations, and corrective actions should consider whether the reviewed programme meets all regulatory and standard industry practice requirements, whether those requirements are met and if there is recorded evidence of compliance. Assessing how effective employee training has been in developing positive behaviour is also critical. 

Modern Technology  

With the use of modern technology, it is much easier to ensure that all of the above safety audit standards are met. Safety audits and compliance are only two of the many sectors that will be completely digitised in the coming years. There is the Inform People’s compliance and performance management software available that makes submitting your Health and Safety Executive (HSE) compliance data simple and fast. Instead of catching up later, why not take measures toward digitisation now? 

Employees are protected by safety audit software, important resources are kept, and audit trails are documented. It may also eliminate human error, increase productivity, and boost employee morale. Using Inform People compliance and performance management software can simplify your audit and ensure that you continue meeting HSE reporting standards. 

Contact us today to ensure your businesses could benefit from improving workplace compliance using safety audit management software.