You’ve assembled your team and completed your audit, but what do you do with all of your safety audit data now? A safety audit is intended to aid in the continual improvement of your organization’s health and safety processes.
Your safety audit data should disclose your organization’s strengths and shortcomings in areas such as safety compliance, important risks and controls, employee safety knowledge and training, and safety resources. This post will show you how to compile your safety audit data, understand it, document improvements, and effect positive change.
A safety audit’s guiding principles
When conducting your audit, consider the following four guiding principle questions to help you obtain the most revealing safety audit data:
Is your safety system compliant with all statutory and best industry practices?
Are the prerequisites being met?
Is there evidence of compliance?
How effective is staff training—can and do they adopt specific safe behaviors to address workplace hazards?
When conducting your safety audit, you should address each safety program need while keeping track of all problems. When you visit the physical location of the chosen region to witness the activity, you should ask comprehensive questions of the personnel who work there in order to acquire as much relevant information as possible.
To ensure that you don’t overlook anything, employ audit checklists that include all safety objectives and applicable legislation.
Examining the data from the safety audit
After your safety audit team has finished gathering information, it is time to sort through all of the data. The goal is to organize the material in order to correct any inadequacies while also highlighting any favorable responses.
You should gather the following documents:
Written programmes;
Procedures;
Work practices;
Equipment inspections;
Incident reports;
Training completions and those scheduled.
Incident reports are especially useful because they highlight possible problem areas. Detailed incident reports assist auditors in applying greater scrutiny to known issue areas.
All comments, recommendations, and corrective actions from safety audits should assess whether the audited program meets all statutory and best industry practice standards. You should also assess whether you are meeting those criteria and document proof of compliance.
It is also critical to determine how effective employee training is in promoting safe behavior. After checking all papers, written programs, procedures, work practices, and equipment, audit teams should sift through the collected safety audit data to create a concise report that explains all aspects of the safety program as well as their recommendations for improvement.
The safety audit’s recommendations
After organizing and reviewing the data from the safety audit, the following step is to establish recommended actions for each deficiency.
Auditors should offer a reason, impact, or effect for why anything happened. Determining the cause and determining the best course of action can result in a better outcome. Examining the impact and effect of the deficit aids in prioritizing your suggestions for improvement. Remember to use the hazard control hierarchy when prioritizing your recommended activities.
You should also review the approach and means by which you are handling the current flaws to see if there is a simpler procedure that you may apply.
On the plus side, you should take note of the processes that are operating well since you can learn a lot from them. You may be able to apply these efficient methods to fill gaps and deficiencies in other areas of your business.
Consider the consequences of these activities when formulating your recommendations. Will your recommendations simply add additional rules, necessitate more record-keeping, or conflict with production tasks? Or will they make the organization safer while still producing at a satisfactory level?