Organizations
might have safety management system in place and adhered to all prescribed
safety standards for workers’ safety and well being. But that doesn’t mean that
the company is safety compliance. It has to be certified and audited
periodically by HSE experts or lead auditors who will study the safety
conditions, risk factors, hazards and kind of safety management system and
document their views along with preventive and improvement measures required to
be taken, for the effective implementation of safety standards and best
practices.
Safety auditors are specialized HSE professionals
who are trained to analyse safety parameters of an organization of any industry
and evolve strategy to develop effective safety and health management system
within the preamble of the mandatory regulations and standard safety
procedures.
When an enterprise engage safety auditor for survey,
analyze, recommend and certify the overall safety conditions, the HSE
professionals will have to answer the following questions while documenting
their findings.
- . Availability of effective safety
management system
- Whether the organization comply with all
safety regulations and standard protocols
- Awareness on safety standards and
healthy work practices among workers
- How frequently the workers are trained
to comply with the safety regulations and practices
- Conditions of safety parameters,
preventive system and disaster preparedness
- . Strength and weakness of the
organization in terms of providing safe and healthy work environment
- Identification of potential hazards and
risks that may lead to accidents
- Effective implementation of crisis
management system
Companies should pro-actively engage quality lead
safety auditors, either within the organization itself or from outside. Those
who are engaged from inside the company are known as internal auditors while
those come from outside or independent professional organization are called as
external auditors.
It’s a company’s prerogative to engage auditors -
whether government recognized, independent or internal ones - to check the
safety conditions of the work places. Whether it is internal or external,
auditing should be unbiased, systematic, proactive and objective for the
interest of the company and welfare of the workers as a whole.
An audit should generally reflects the objective
views of the actual status, evaluates compliance, checks the adequacy of safety
policy, recognizes success and identifies the potential weaknesses that may
cause accidents or disasters in future.
As far as the sequence, depth, content and purpose
of audit, both external and internal auditing methods have very similar
procedures but differ only in approach.
Internal audit may become subjective as it is done by own people about
the own organization or department. There is possibility that most of the
negative factors, weakness and non-compliance may not come to light for action
or corrective measures.
Whereas, the third party auditing can bring out the
bare facts about the safety condition of the company and provide
recommendations to rectify the defects and improve the efficacy of the safety
management system.
It is to be understood that safety and health
auditing of any work places should be taken very seriously by the management
and also workers instead of treating it as a mere formality. It is like a
medical report warning a person about the possibility of forthcoming serious
health problem. Companies should take preventive step and corrective measures
to thwart any future disasters or accidents and associated losses.
