With National Safe Work Month kicking off on October 1, it’s a great time to re-commit to building a safe and healthy workplace.
This year's theme, Safety is Everyone’s Business, highlights the need to come together and exchange ideas to build healthy and safe workplaces for everyone.
But where do you start? A health and safety audit is a good place to help you on your way.
Who can conduct a health and safety audit?
Safety audits are key to finding out where your work health and safety performance currently sits, and where it needs to be.
WHS audits can be done in-house, via an external consultant such as Epigroup to provide a fresh set of eyes and perspective, or a combination of both.
If you’re conducting an internal audit, you will need to compare what’s happening in your business with what’s written in your safety management system.
This will highlight any gaps you need to close. If you don’t have a safety management system, get in touch and we can create one for you.
Why is a health and safety audit important?
As well as identifying gaps, health and safety audits are important for challenging the benchmarks you’ve set out in your safety management system.
They’re also helpful for coming up with actionable steps to improve your business’ safety.
While there are many types of safety audits, the two most widely used are:
- Management system audits
- Safety function audits
Management system audits:
A management system audit is “horizontal” and looks across the entire company structure and considers the broad, in-depth scope of management policies and procedures that are in place to manage an organisation’s health and safety at the site.
Safety function audits:
Safety function audits are “vertical” and look at the detail of a specific activity through a vertical slice of the organisation’s structure — from senior management to the workplace.
Safety function audits can include, but are not limited to:
- Classified plant and administration
- Electrical safety management systems
- Emergency preparedness
- Fixed plant
- Isolation and tagout
- Manual tasks
- Noise
- Traffic management
- Workshops
The safety audit process in six steps
Our partners at Epigroup have created a six-step work health and safety audit. They key points are:
- Identify areas to audit
Make a note of each area of the business that should be audited. Some areas have simple processes, while others are more complex. It’s important that an internal audit doesn’t try to do everything at once. You will also need to set benchmarks and standards and ensure everyone agrees on them before the audit takes place.
- Decide how often to audit
Choosing how often to audit will depend on the size of your business, the industry you’re in and if your work environment is continuously changing (such as a construction site).
However, some timings are decided for you, for example HACCP audits must be completed quarterly. Your safety management system should outline how often you need to audit different areas. You should then schedule them out for the year ahead and send out a copy to keep staff in the loop.
- Conduct the audit
This will look different depending on your organisation and the area/s being audited. You may need to test equipment, or ask staff to explain a process and compare it to what’s written in a policy to assess competency and potential training shortfalls. You can:
- Start with a kick-off meeting
- Carry out in-field observations and interviews
- Collect evidence
- Document the results
Take notes as you go, review any collected documents and comprehensively write up your findings. Document any gaps in compliance, and communicate the findings to relevant staff before completing the final report.
- Report the findings
Keep your report succinct and use a tabular format with graphs, diagrams and photos to make information easier to find and understand.
The report should cover the positives in your business as well as any gaps and shortcomings. Use a consequence/impact/effect model for why something occurred.
As a business owner and decision maker, your report is vital for highlighting how to improve your business’ safety. If you’re not the decision maker, your report will need to go to management to take appropriate steps towards improvement. To help things along, you should create an audit action plan.
- Create an audit action plan
Now that you’ve found areas to improve, you’ll need an audit action plan to improve your business.
There are three categories in an action plan:
- Non-compliance — the organisation is in breach of a requirement and urgent action is required to fix any non-compliant issues. If the contravention can’t be rectified in a day or two, a Notice to Remedy with a due date is provided.
- Observation — the opinion of the auditor (and therefore subjective). The organisation can decide whether to implement any changes based on the advice provided, but it isn’t mandatory.
- Opportunity for Improvement — a suggestion for making a change that could lead to a better outcome, but it’s not compulsory.
Use your report to guide your action plan. Decide what’s important and communicate it back to the organisation so that everyone is on the same page. Remember to revert back to your action plan regularly to continually improve your business.
For more information on how Epigroup’s services can help your business, call 1300 414 313 or email [email protected].
