Workplace Safety Audits – What, Why & How?
What’s a Safety Audit?
A safety audit is a tool that helps to assess compliance in the workplace. The audit process involves conducting surveys to:
- Identify the safety regulations that apply to a factory, manufacturing facility, or business.
- Determine whether the safety and environmental requirements are being followed.
- Assess the various systems, procedures, and functions in place to ensure that all rules are being followed.
- Identify and find out methods to achieve compliance.
Why are Safety Audits Essential?
A safety audit can help to identify and correct the gaps in workplace safety. It not only helps in improving workplace safety but also helps in reducing liabilities. Safety audits demonstrate your commitment to compliance. Additionally, it helps in increasing employee awareness of safety and environmental regulations.
Another biggest benefit of workplace audits is that they win the favour of regulatory and compliance agencies. A thoroughly completed workplace audits with the right follow-up improves your company’s standing not just with regulatory bodies but also to your stakeholders – board of directors, shareholders, clients, vendors, customers, and the general public.
An audit will in general look to assess the following factors:
- The strength and weakness of your business
- How the system performs within the aims of the organization
- If the company is fulfilling its legal obligation within its industry
- Proper performance reviewing system is in place
If you still think auditing is not mandatory for the success of your business, let me today explain the various advantages of conducting regular internal audits and external audits
- Highlight Potential Problems
If there are any issues or problems behind the scenes, it can lead to accidents and other negative consequences for your business. Prevention is better than cure, so the sooner you identify them, the sooner you can work on implementing the right solutions for the problem
- Increase Employee Awareness
Auditing can increase awareness and understanding of the environment and safety regulations. This is important for the improvement of the business. The more skilled employee, the more is the growth.
- Enhance your Company’s Credentials
If you’re looking for new investors or clients, it’s essential you do regular safety audits. A vast majority of businesses search for business partners with proper health and safety procedures. Having a positive public relation can greatly benefit your business goals. It attracts investors and also works as an incentive to pull in skilled employees to work for the company.
- Save Money
A healthy and safety audit provides a calculated analysis of procedures and provides the changes to be implemented. This will save you thousands of rupees in operating costs.
- Helps you comply with Safety and Environmental Laws
There are many regulations and laws for each business to ensure safety within the industry. If you are not following the rules and regulations, it can cause trouble and can affect the future of your business. Knowing that you have the proper regulations will eliminate the risk of injury in the workspace and benefit your employees.
- Helps you win the Favour of Regulatory Agencies
A complete audit with proper follow up signals that your company is making good-faith to comply with applicable regulatory requirements.
Now, that you’ve seen the benefits of audits, we come to the million-dollar question,
Internal or Third-Party Audits – Which Work Better?
A third-party audit allows for fresh eyes and a different approach to research, review, and analysis of company safety programs. There are four major benefits of conducting third-party safety audits:
- Knowledge and validation
Third party audit companies have vast experience in conducting an audit in a different environment in a different situation. This gives you the best policies, programmes to strengthen the industry. Third party providers can serve to validate existing programmes and provide recommendation for growth or change when deemed necessary.
- Objectivity
Third party audits provide you with a neutral verdict about the company’s existing system, policies, and process without the natural familiarity that occurs over time with regular staff and day-to-day routines.
- Accurate Results
Due to objective positioning, the results of third-party audits provide a more accurate review of what is occurring within multiple environments of a company in regards to safety practices.
- Lower Business Impact
Internal audits can be taxing on time and labour resources and take focus away from your overall business functions. A third party auditor can enter a location with the sole purpose of conducting an audit. They efficiently conduct the audit and interviews without disturbing the regular routines of the company.
Through a range of international standards, ethical partners like Totalika ensure that organizations have effective occupational health and safety system in place to protect employees, generate customer confidence and enhance business reputation.
Let’s look at some of the services provided by Totalika:
- Social and Environmental Audits
There are certain norms needed to be followed by all large corporations. There are local and international laws that clearly state minimum wages, work conditions and hours, welfare norms that need to be meet ethical treatment of workers, the environment and communities.
Audits are undertaken to ensure compliance with corrective action plans. External auditing agencies ensure that factories are upholding laws protecting the factory workers and the environment. Environment audits focus on water supply management, wastewater disposal, safe storage, use and disposal of hazardous chemicals, air quality management, and energy management and so on.
- Risk Assessment and Safety Audits
Ethical partners are committed to making sure your premise is safer using the best risk Assessment and safety Audit process in the industry. They help in bring safety standards in your industry and make suitable recommendations to prevent incidents from happening, also crisis response plans, in the unfortunate case of an incident.
The ethical partners evaluate the level safety in your premises, reduce the safety risks and liabilities for your organization and improve the relationship between your team and associated communities.
- Traceability Audit
Traceability is the ability to track any supply through all stages of production from processing to shipment (including importation and at retail). Traceability audit is mainly seen in the food industry.
- Quality Control and Shipment Inspection
During the season, industry like garment tends to focus more on deadlines rather than the quality of the product. The quality control team rejects the order, to make sure this doesn’t happen. An independent quality control team is set up to check the quality of products before shipment.
If you are looking for an ethical partner, we offer complete end to end solutions @Totalika. We have years of experience in the industry and can take the burden off your shoulders and help you to achieve your business goals. We understand that each industry is different and each service, problems, and solutions for them are different. We are proud of ourselves with our customer service.
You can contact us on Facebook, or call us on +911246613137, +911242663021. Someone from our team will contact us to make sure you get a solution to your problem. You can mail us to support@totalika.org.
