During 2014 I have had the pleasure of working with some great forward thinking businesses in the West Midlands. Some of them had wide success in growing their business, whilst others have found last recession a real challenge to keep turnover going. Some of those who have put health and safety systems in place a few years back, have recently revisited their arrangements with my help. Their required outcome is to ensure that even though the business may have change and evolved, the systems still meets the legal obligations.
So, you have looked at what you have and thought it looked OK? It stands a good chance that you may be missing a health and safety audit trick and here’s why. Whilst it’s easy to do a tick box audit and say the business complies with H&S law, a surprising number have not actually audited against their own policies, procedures and risk assessments.
A good example is a manufacturing company I visited. They had hired a consultant to carry out an audit a year ago and picked up a few areas for improvement. Whilst reading through it became evident that although they had been measured against legal compliance they hadn’t checked their own organisational standards. The result was that within their own documentation there were lots of holes. There were holes where people hadn’t been trained, safety information was incomplete and equipment wasn’t available.
A thorough, detailed audit will provide performance indicators against both legislation and company standards. It will help you understand where your company is at and clear the way to plan for the future and set health and safety objectives. A comprehensive audit will help you understand where you business is now and create goals of where you want to be.
For more information about health & safety audits contact us here