Why and How to Audit Your Workplace Safety Policies

The goal of conducting a safety audit is to ensure that your company health and safety procedures are adequate and to improve and update them as well.

The purpose is to locate the safety risks in the workplace and the severity of those risks, to determine how well your current safety procedures are working, to determine if your procedures comply with legal guidelines, generate ideas for improving your procedures, and to make sure you have adequate resources devoted to health and safety.

A health and safety audit is conducted to determine if the safety procedures you have in place are working effectively or whether they need to be changed. Such audits look at various issues, such as planning for emergencies, organizational structure, how procedures are carried out, identifying hazards and how to control them, training, measuring and evaluating risks.

Here is the sequence to follow in conducting an audit.

1. Answer questions

As a starting point for the audit, you should use required legal guidelines and standards. Evaluate your current safety procedures and standards by asking how well they comply with legal requirements. Then, determine how well your company is actually adhering to these standards by examining how well employees carry out the procedures in their day-to-day activities.

2. Write an audit report

Any discrepancies or problems that you discover in step one should be outlined in the audit report. The report should pinpoint what the safety risks are and how serious those risks are.

3. Develop a plan of action to address the risks

Determine what steps you will take to control the risks you have identified, prioritize your action steps, and incorporate these steps into an action plan. Then, the action plan needs to be given to those employees who have been trained to handle workplace safety issues.

Some of the steps you need to take may have to be included in more long-range business objectives. These are steps that usually involve more careful planning and the allocation of greater resources, which means inclusion in budget outlines.

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