Three Critical Guidelines for Safety Auditing in Your Commercial Space

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Managing the risks in your workplace through safety auditing is essential. The auditing process will allow you to identify the existing hazards in your commercial space. Consequently, you will be able to reduce these risks and create a safer environment for your employees. The inspection will also identify potential hazards in the building before they can escalate and cause dangerous situations. Additionally, you can develop an actionable risk reduction plan through the findings of the assessment. In ideal circumstances, you should hire an experienced consultant for the safety auditing tasks. However, you can also perform in-house inspections. Here are some guidelines on safety auditing in your business space.

Create a Risk Assessment Plan

You should develop a clear programme to help you identify the risks in your workplace. Establishing this type of plan will help you focus on the measures that your company has in place to minimise health and safety problems. You should ensure that the programme will help you identify the hazards which are covered and those that require more attention. When creating your plan, you should be keen on the most significant hazards for your business. Also, be sure to check your records on injuries because problems in workplaces tend to recur. When you understand the issues that you should consider, you can establish a timeline for the audit.

Choose an Appropriate Audit Method

You should choose the right method for carrying out your risk assessment plan. If the selected audit method is not appropriate, you will not get correct results. Consequently, you will not be able to manage the hazard in your workplace. Ideally, you should use a mixture of methods so that you will get the most appropriate results. The suitable approaches can range from face-to-face interviews and questionnaires filling to completing checklists after visual examination and reviewing old documentation in the workplace. Remember, all methods are not appropriate for every safety assessment. Therefore, take the nature of the workplace, objectives and scope into consideration before choosing your strategy.

Prepare Accurate Reports

Finally, you should prepare a record of the auditing project. Documentation is essential for future reference, especially during other safety audits. An ideal report should include all the details of the audit, but the length and completeness of the documentation should take the scope and audience into account. At the very least, you should have concise details on the objectives of the audit and the findings. Also, clear recommendations should be made to ensure resolution of the workplace hazards.

29 November 2017