Safety audits and inspections are essential tools for keeping workplaces safe and efficient. They help uncover hazards and compliance gaps that might impact your team’s results. Over time, they’ll not only prevent incidents but also drive measurable improvements in other areas of performance.
What Are Safety Audits and Inspections?
Safety audits and inspections are related but distinct processes. Together, they provide both a long-term evaluation of safety systems and a short-term check on day-to-day risks.
A safety audit is a systematic evaluation of an organization’s safety programs, policies, and procedures to determine their effectiveness and compliance. These reviews are broad in scope, conducted less frequently, and can take days or weeks to complete.
In contrast, safety inspections are narrower in focus and more frequent than audits. They examine daily work areas, equipment, and employee practices to identify hazards or unsafe behaviors that need immediate attention.
Why Are They Important?
Conducting safety audits and inspections makes it easier to maintain compliance with OSHA and other regulatory standards. It reveals gaps in policies, unsafe work conditions, and unsafe behaviors before they lead to incidents.
These processes also drive accountability by holding leaders, supervisors, and employees responsible for maintaining a safe environment. Over time, they improve safety culture, reduce incident rates, and lower the operational costs tied to accidents, downtime, or fines.
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Download this free template to use as a guideline for your team’s safety audits and inspections.
Effectively Conducting EHS Audits
When preparing for a safety audit, determine its scope and objectives. You might want to review previous audits to better understand prior findings and recommendations. That way, you can get even more value out of your own audit.
The key to success is proper planning. Here are some questions you can answer in anticipation of an upcoming audit to make it more valuable:
- Who will conduct the audit?
- What is the scope of the audit?
- Where will the audit take place?
- How will auditor document their findings?
- Who will assign corrective actions?
Getting Value from Safety Audits
The goal of a safety audit is to assess the effectiveness of your company or site’s safety policies, procedures, and processes. These are the foundations of employee safety. But aside from the immediate benefits, regular audits can help you monitor your entire EHS program performance over time.
The best practice is to have written plans, procedures, and other documents to establish baseline results for the audit. With a baseline in place, audits will be able to look for strengths and weaknesses in your EHS program. This leads to more targeted observations and, ultimately, better results.
Once they complete a safety audit, the auditor should put all notes and observations into a detailed report. This report should summarize their findings and provide recommendations for how to improve before the next audit.
Detailed Workplace Safety Inspections
Every good safety inspection starts with a clear goal. What area, process, etc., do you specifically want to target? Remember, inspections should have a smaller scope than audits.
Once you decide what to inspect, determine how often you’ll inspect it. For example, if you’re inspecting the cleanliness of a food production area, you’ll likely need at least one (if not more) checks per shift. On the other hand, large equipment inspections might only need to take place every few weeks or quarterly.
The frequency can depend on several factors like:
- Guidelines from a regulatory agency
- Incident or accident frequency rate
- Introduction of new processes or equipment
- Number of shifts
- Number of man-hours worked
- Complexity of the operation
The checklist your team uses for inspections should align with the regulatory requirements that apply.
[Check out some of the safety audit and inspection checklists in our EHS template library!]
It’s typically best practice to schedule these inspections in advance so you can proactively control new hazards. Plus, it helps to avoid disruptions to the operation, especially if yours runs 24/7.
Don’t forget to account for potential shutdowns based on the results of your inspections. Communicate to personnel and the management team immediately if you find a hazard that needs immediate correction. For non-threatening issues, document them in your inspection report and make sure you assign action items to fix them later.
Your final safety inspection report should contain your findings, list any immediate actions you took, and identify any further actions needed. Keep these reports accessible in case you need them for a third-party compliance audit or internal review.
Proactive Risk Management with EHS Software
Safety audits and investigations only matter if you do something with your findings. Over time, you should be able to find patterns that make it easier to control risks. For example, maybe you notice that the same piece of equipment has recurring safety issues. Or maybe you’ve found that a certain type of control measure has worked well across different processes. Use these insights to build a faster, safer, and smarter EHS program.
The key to proactive risk management is using EHS software to manage safety audits and inspections. Frontline ACT is a user-friendly incident management and action tracking system for doing just that. It allows you to document your findings, schedule and assign action items, track them to completion, and build reports for different areas of performance.
Our configurable events workflow in Frontline ACT allows you to build out custom processes for different types of safety audits and inspections. You can tailor each event by requiring users to fill out specific forms or checklists, requiring approvers and reviewers for certain tasks, and more. This means you can simplify your processes based on the level or risk associated with the reviews.
If you want to learn more about Frontline ACT for safety audits and inspections, book a demo with our sales team. Interested in the cost? Use our pricing calculator to get a free quote for your team!
