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A health and safety audit assesses an organisation's health and safety standards. It looks at aspects such as workplace policies, processes, procedures and systems, highlighting areas for improvement.

A good health and safety audit is much more than a tick-box exercise. They help to proactively improve your business, identifying enhancements that can be made.

It will cover aspects such as:

• Compliance with laws and regulations
• Are you're the understandability and communication of your safety policies
• Process documentation
• Systems suitability and outcome delivery
• Health and wellbeing support
• Workforce engagement in your safety culture

A health and safety audit is a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes.

Conducting a health and safety audit is not a legal requirement. However, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommends that audits are undertaken. Therefore, many businesses choose to do so, as part of health and safety best practice. In some industries, audits may be a condition of insurance cover.

In summary, you do not have to do a health and safety audit - but it is highly beneficial if you do.

There are many benefits from completing a health and safety audit. Broadly, these are:

- Improved safety

Health and safety audits help to improve safety in the workplace. They help reduce accidents and incidents, improve communication, and help engage employees.

- Compliance

A health and safety audit helps ensure that your organisation is legally and regulatorily compliant. This reduces risk to your business of regulatory sanctions such as prosecution and fines. It also helps to develop a healthy compliance culture within your business.

- Cost savings

Dealing with risk early prevents costs mounting up later on, as accidents and incidents are avoided. Employees stay safe, healthy, and productive, and regulatory fines are avoided. Audits can also lead to efficiencies and cost savings in other areas when improvements are identified and actioned.

You can easily see that a good health and safety audit, using the right approach, can be an extremely valuable thing to do.

As well as the benefits to improved safety, better compliance, and costs savings, there are a number of other reasons why a health and safety audit is a good idea.

These can include:

- Assessing the effectiveness of your current health and safety management system.
- Finding out how well your employees understand health and safety policies and procedures.
- Identifying and resolving potential risks before they occur.
- Helping to implement improvements to your health and safety management system.
- Evidence compliance more easily.

Your health and safety audit may well cover different things depending on the size and type of business, and the industry.

You can conduct comprehensive whole business audits, or audits of specific departments, divisions, or operations.

Some fundamental elements that are included in most health and safety audits though:

- Assessing compliance with laws and regulations.
- Evaluating your health and safety policies, procedures, and systems.
- Understanding how well your employees know and comply with health and safety policies and procedures.
- Reviewing and learning from accidents or incidents that have occurred in the past.
- Identifying and mitigating potential risks in advance before they escalate.

The necessary frequency of your health and safety audit will depend on the size and complexity of your organisation. The outcomes of previous audits will also inform this. They should normally be conducted on a regular basis though, normally at least once a year. You can also conduct interim audits for specific areas as needed. This helps improvements to be embedded and risks to be resolved in a timely way.

There are several approaches you can take. You can do it internally, externally using consultants, or take a hybrid approach – particularly if your digital health and safety management system enables this. Health and safety software such as Work Wallet digitalises the process, making audits quicker and simpler.

- Internal health and safety audit

This must be completed by an employee whom the HSE deems to be a "competent person" - meaning "someone who has sufficient training and experience or knowledge and other qualities that allow them to assist you properly." Your auditor should therefore be suitably qualified (e.g. by NEBOSH or IOSH). An internal health and safety audit will probably cost less and be less disruptive.

- External health and safety audit

An external H&S audit is done on your behalf by an experienced "competent person" – most likely by a health and safety consultant. The consultant inspects your business, spotting gaps and improvements. This could be more comprehensive, but will likely cost more and be more disruptive.

- Hybrid approach

You can mix internal and external audits, enabled by good health and safety software - and particularly if you use the same software solution as your consultant. Work Wallet has a contractor network and can put you in contact. You can input and share data with your consultant, who can advise you remotely. This balances costs, and minimises disruption.

Don't overthink things! A simple health and safety audit template checklist could be all you need, and is quick and easy to complete.

Identify the risk groups pertinent to you circumstances, and separate them sections (e.g. Chemical).

Then create a sub-list for each section of the various specific aspects you need to check (e.g. Are chemicals stored securely?)

Add a simple yes/no or compliant/non-compliant tick box, and record the location, date, time, and sign off.

This approach may work best for task-orientated checks.

Using smart and simple health and safety auditing software such as Work Wallet makes this faster to do.

A comprehensive auditing approach may mix of checklists, interviews, observations, and risk assessments.

It is common to build in a sliding scale or scoring matrix as well, to quantify risk to your business. Typically, this is built to factor in the probability/ likelihood of occurrence, and the impact/severity that will be felt if it does occur. Use the following formula:

Risk = Likelihood x Severity

A scoring matrix may be as simple as colour coding your results, to indicate priority or urgency. It may also typically take the form of a three- or five-point scale.

For your scoring to make sense, you need to describe it and contextualise it within you business.

You will also need to document the control measures needed.

While this may seem daunting, the good news is, health and safety software can do it all for you!

Check out Work Wallet's Audits & Inspections tool and Risk Assessments module for more information.

Yes, through our settings panel, your admins can easily build their own Audit Types, Checklists and Responses as needed.

Indeed - you can choose at a checklist level if you want to enable scoring for the Audit. There's a range of options to score it how you need, including percentages, quality scoring and custom grading thresholds.

Not at all. You can fully configure your template to use your company's branding without a Work Wallet logo in sight. It is your report, afterall!

Yes, you can setup your users with a variety of permissions, including setting individuals as Site Managers. This will give them access to all inspections completed on the site they are responsible for.