CQ Guide: 5-step safety inspection process to create a safe work environment

5 Steps of a Robust Safety Inspection Process at Your Workplace

For conducting an effective safety inspection, you must follow these steps to streamline your process including

• Clearly define your success criteria (of the part in question)
• Make An Effective Inspection Strategy
  You should make a health and safety plan before conducting safety inspections involving these elements such as

• Make A Schedule: The initial step is to make a schedule to decide how regularly you must conduct safety inspections (ideally, once every six months or so) and decide the timeline.
• Create An Inspector List: It is important to establish a team involved in the safety inspection process to delegate duties according to their individual skills (trained safety professionals, equipment experts, and supervisors).
• Make An Inspection Checklist: It is helpful to have an inspection checklist that can help the inspectors keep on track and ensure that they do not miss anything.

• Perform the Safety Inspection
  After creating a successful strategy, it’s time to conduct the inspection. The inspection team should check all work processes and equipment properly to identify potential workplace hazards including

• Improper machine guards and poor work practices (inadequate safety training, overloading equipment, using defective tools)
• Defective safety equipment
• Lack of a well-stocked first aid kit
• Biological issues such as parasites
• Environmental hazards like fumes or radiation
• Physical issues such as heat, electrical hazards, wear and tear of equipment, etc

• Examine the Data
  Once the inspection data is collected after performing a safety inspection, it needs to be thoroughly examined and analyzed to identify gaps and take preventive measures to prevent the hazards from occurring again and improve workplace practices.

• Implement CAPA
  Once the inspection data is examined, you must implement a comprehensive CAPA to mitigate potential hazards found. This CAPA should cover the following aspects – the delegation of work for all the actions, the total time taken for the actions to be completed, and reporting the progress to the team responsible for corrective actions.

• Follow Up on Your Finding
  You must conduct regular follow-ups to ensure that your findings from the safety inspection are properly addressed. The findings should be recorded and shared with the relevant stakeholders and the management for correcting and strengthening processes.

Embed Safety Culture with ComplianceQuest Safety Inspections

The end-to-end process of safety inspections, including planning, conducting, and following up on safety inspections, can be complicated with numerous inspection data, forms, and checklists. Managing all this manually could be increasingly more challenging, while using an automated and modern EHS solution such as ComplianceQuest can help to make the process smooth and safe.

To build a safety-focused company culture, the ComplianceQuest EHS solution can help to identify skill gaps and schedule training to improve safety where employees can feel empowered to notify managers about safety concerns. Additionally, your employees should know that they are protected by following OSHA-stipulated guidelines.