For several years, globalisation, combined with significant advances in technology has led to a fundamental shift in how health and safety professionals utilise technology to manage EHS compliance. The pandemic has proven a further catalyst for this change, as workforces have adapted to work remotely, and safety-related risks have become more complex in the light of Covid-19.
Furthermore, the more recent shift in returning to the workplace once again has created its own set of EHS challenges, driven by the need to re-evaluate EHS risks and often, get up to speed with a backlog of paper-based compliance checks – Risk Assessments, Employee Training Records and Internal Safety Audits, to name but a few.
Maintaining Health & Safety compliance relies on a business’s ability to assess how well it is following their relevant statutory responsibilities, establishing any gaps in compliance and importantly, how quickly these gaps are addressed. An internal audit programme is a key mechanism for doing just that.
Given the challenges outlined above, it is no surprise that many companies are currently struggling to be proactive with their audit schedule – resourcing issues, hybrid working arrangements and increased workloads activities bought about by the pandemic mean that those businesses who are still reliant on paper and offline systems to manage audit schedules are at best, struggling with backlog and at worst, working without effective visibility of the outcomes of audits, making it difficult to address non-conformances as quickly as they need to maintain compliance and address risks.
Eight ways that digitising safety audits will benefit your business:
- Provide access to centralised, real-time data: By utilising an electronic system, audit data will be held in a single database, allowing you maintain visibility on the progress of your audit schedules and their outcomes.
- Offer a mechanism for BI Data Analytics: High volumes of data require sophisticated reporting tools to analyse trends and risk profiles, highlight areas of concern and automate the generation of relevant MI reports.
- Save time: Automated workflows and standardised audit template options that are part-populated with key information will help to significantly speed up the audit process. Moreover, the right digital solution will also provide automation for calculating risk scores and therefore highlight performance trends and automatically flag areas of concern.
- Ensure consistency: Templated systems will help you to standardise your audits, allowing congruent data collection across a diverse selection of auditors, sites and processes.
- Automate audit scheduling and corrective action management: Workflows and conditional logic functionality will allow you not only to create efficiencies in audit scheduling, but also provide you with ability to auto-assign tasks and remedial actions, as well as track the progress of these tasks through to completion.
- Ensure Information Security Compliance: All digital platforms that are used to store data must comply with applicable security and data protection laws, meaning that data security is often taken more seriously than with paper-based processes.
- Deliver Cost Savings: Whilst the initial implementation and training of staff will require financial investment, the significant efficiencies gained through automation and improved performance visibility, will ultimately provide overall cost savings. Furthermore, improved safety management will also reduce the risk of workplace accidents and work-related ill health – the largest safety-related expense of all.
- Enable Offline Data capture: Remote working is an increasing trend as businesses adopt hybrid working models, and this brings with it increased challenges in completing audits as connectivity, multi-device optimisation and data consolidation become more of an issue. Cloud-based software that also features offline date capture and mobile compatibility functionality can help streamline remote-working processes.
To summarise, introducing a digital audit system will not only help your business to discharge its statutory HSE responsibilities effectively, but will also significantly speed up processes, reduce costs and improve the quality of your data, ultimately helping you to reduce risk and improve workplace safety.
To learn how our cloud-based risk management platform, AssessNET can help you to digitise your audit processes, book an online demonstration or call us on 01908 915272 to speak to one of our advisors.
