Most injuries that occur in the workplace are a result of unsafe behaviors rather than unsafe conditions. Conducting regular workplace safety audits may help prevent accidents and injuries. A safety audit will help you gauge to what extent your employees understand your safety procedures and follow safe practices. Audits can be an effective safety management tool and can help you analyze and correct unsafe behaviors.
What is a safety audit?
A safety audit (not to be confused with a safety inspection) is a formal review of employee safety training programs, policies, and procedures. The audit allows you to analyze whether job tasks are being performed safely and hazards are being eliminated. Audits include observations of employee working habits as they do a variety of tasks.
If your employee training program has not been reviewed recently, it’s a good idea to plan an audit. Your employee training program should ensure that it prepares employees to perform their jobs safely. It should provide compliance training and specific training for higher hazard or complex job tasks.
When and where should you conduct a safety audit?
Safety audits may be scheduled or unannounced. Audits should be conducted wherever employees work such as a group area, individual work spaces, in the office, facility, or field location.
Who should conduct a safety audit?
Each workplace should create a safety audit team. Your team can be made up of managers, supervisors, leads, project teams, and even employees. The audit team will walk through the workplace and focus on given job tasks while observing how employees perform those tasks. When conducting an audit, you may want to ask yourself the following questions:
- Are employees following procedures such as conducting grounding and lockout/tagout?
- Are they wearing required personal protective equipment (PPE)?
- Are workers lifting properly and following good ergonomics?
It is important to provide immediate feedback to your employees during an audit. Be sure to compliment safe behaviors and ask for feedback on how to correct unsafe actions.
During the audit
- Document your observations and provide recommendations to correct non-compliant actions.
- Assign follow-up support on corrective actions given during the audit.
- Present the findings to a supervisor, foreman, or management team.
After the audit
Once it's complete, share the audit results with your employees. This should include both positive behaviors observed as well as those behaviors that need improvement. Be sure to include information on what corrective actions were taken.
Conducting regular workplace safety audits is critical to preventing injuries and accidents. Audits are important to effective safety management as a continuous process of workplace safety planning, analysis, and correction as needed.