3 Principal Types of Safety Audits You Need to Know About
For safety professionals, the value of a safety audit can take distinct perspectives. Some see it merely as a legal requirement, while others look at it as a valuable indicator to secure operational safety.
At the core of it, safety audits are an organized process to record, evaluate and report data about an organization’s overall health and safety management system.
As an integral part of a safety management system, safety audits are often cited as the key process to examine and identify weaknesses in work procedures. It is the only program that can help you anticipate and tackle safety issues by:
- Conducting routine inspections to ensure constant compliance
- Identifying safety violations and communicating audit results
- Assessing management involvement and safety adherence by staff
- Periodic maintenance of machinery to identify underlying threats
- Ensuring statutory compliance to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and other regulations.
- Recommending improvements in the companies safety policy.
Types of Safety Audits:
There are three principal types of safety audits, segregated based on the data it captures. They are:
- Compliance Audit
- Program Audit
- Management System Audit
Learn more on each audit type:
1. Compliance Audit:
Compliance audits are one of the basic safety audits, where a safety auditor reviews a company’s safety rules and policies to ensure that it adheres to OSHA standards or other safety regulations. Failure to comply can lead to hefty fines.
A compliance audit following OSHA standards facilitates stringent measures to employ a set of programs, regulations, record-keeping practices and training modules that regulate safe work conditions.
To evade fines, companies tend to put their sole focus on compliance audits. This can be counter-productive as compliance audits concentrate on controlling tangible safety issues while being oblivious to immediate unsafe acts and behaviors.
2. Program Audit:
Evaluating safe practices sometimes requires dissecting the rule book by gauging inputs from employees and every single individual component to determine if the program can establish safe outcomes
Safety program audits are the only solution that puts your HSE program to the test, extensively evaluating the design and effectiveness of your safety program from the inside-out. While program audits can effectively find gaps in the implementation of your safety program, on its own, program audits lack the authenticity to determine top standards.
3. Management System Audit
Management system audit is a combination of compliance and program audits. Its goal is to evaluate the existing performance of the safety program and determine if it conforms to company policy and regulatory norms.
A management system audit integrates a more comprehensive auditing approach, where compliance reviews, worker interviews, and workplace observation are intertwined into a single auditing process to give you an overall picture of your safety program.
Conclusion:
History is never a good indicator of the effectiveness of an audit program. Conducting manual audits can be labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive. Even the pay-off may not always be result-oriented, especially if a company has an elongated period of zero blemishes with minimal recommendations post audits.
With tight safety budgets and no tangible results, companies eventually drop auditing off their safety program. While this can prove detrimental in the long run, it also opens up the organization to vulnerabilities that can adversely affect reputation, employee morale and take a steep cut from your bottom-line.
A safety auditing software like Safetymint is a cost-effective and robust solution that can effectively track hazards, set safety benchmarks and easily manage compliance in a centralized platform.
Integrating Safetymint’s safety auditing system, can ignite a tight knit safety culture across facilities with enhanced communication and coordination to manage, track and report safety audits effortlessly.
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Joshua Martyn was a content manager at Safetymint, crafting helpful contents that enlighten readers and EHS professionals alike, about fresh trends, technologies and perspectives from the world of safety.
