Safety Inspection Processes
Safety Inspection Processes
• Running any business comes with its own set of
risks. Of all the types of risks, though, safety risks
are the ones that demand the most attention. After
all, ensuring a safe workplace for all employees is
the responsibility of every employer. Potential
safety hazards must be mitigated with an effective
risk management process. Of course, before
implementing such a process, safety risks and
hazards need to be found. This is where site safety
inspections come in.
• A safety inspection involves a thorough scrutiny of the
workplace to:
– Identify and record potential health and safety hazards
– Review safety equipment (e.g., fire extinguishers, first aid
kits, safety shoes, protective gear, etc.)
– Examine the effectiveness of your workplace safety practices
– Check for compliance with health and safety regulations
– Recommend corrective actions to rectify or eliminate any
hazards
Why Are Site Safety Inspections Important?
• Conducting safety inspections in the workplace is important
for several reasons. Regulatory compliance would be the
first of these, as even though the Occupational Health and
Safety Administration (OSHA) doesn't mandate inspections,
they strongly recommend it.
• Of course, compliance is not the only reason to carry out
regular inspections for hazards at your workplace. They can
be an important part of your overall health and safety
program, if your company has one. Some of the reasons for
establishing a process for regular safety inspections include:
• They help prevent risk of accidents and injuries
• They create an atmosphere of safety and security
in the workplace
• They show your commitment to ensuring your
employees' well-being
• A detailed inspection report or an inspection
certificate from a third party may also help you
with property insurance issues, if you ever face
them
5 Steps to Conduct an Effective Safety Inspection at Your Workplace
• To conduct an effective safety inspection, it
may be useful to consider it a part of a
continuous improvement cycle to ensure the
safest possible workplace for your employees.
Here are the steps you can take to streamline
your process.
1. Create an Inspection Strategy
• Before conducting a safety inspection, it’s imperative to plan for it.
Creating a safety inspection plan involves the following elements:
• A schedule
– Since inspections should be regular, the first step would be to decide how
regularly you're going to conduct them (ideally, one every six months or so) and
when these inspections would be.
– Try to ensure that your inspection covers all the shifts in the day, and also the
areas where the work is not as regular (such as equipment maintenance
activities) so that all possible hazards are explored. This schedule should then be
communicated to all the stakeholders involved in the inspection (such as shift
supervisors, managers, etc.).
• A list of the inspectors
– It is important to know who will be involved in the safety
inspection process and to delegate duties according to the
inspectors' individual skills, if applicable. It’s a good practice to
establish a team for this purpose as placing the burden on a
single person, even if they are highly trained, may lead to errors
or omissions.
– The team could consist of individuals with diverse skills — for
example, trained safety professionals, equipment experts, and
supervisors.
• An inspection checklist
– It’s useful to have an idea of what to look for before your team
conducts the inspection. An inspection checklist tailored to your
workplace may help the inspectors keep on track and ensure that they
don't miss anything. For an efficient and streamlined process, you can
organize the checklist into categories such as equipment safety, fall
protection, accident risk, etc.
– Finally, make sure to include all the elements of your workplace,
including the people (e.g., whether your workers are following safety
practices), the equipment (e.g., wear and tear, corrosion, etc.), and
even the environment (e.g., noise, lighting, emissions, etc.)
• A list of guidelines
– Before you start inspecting your workplace, you may
want to refer to relevant guidelines or standards to know
what to look for. For instance, while checking for fire
hazards, you can check the National Fire Protection
Association’s Life Safety Code 101. NFPA's document
outlines the minimum design, operation, and
maintenance requirements for various types of spaces to
ensure safety from fire or similar emergency situations.
2. Conduct the Safety Inspection
• Once a comprehensive strategy has been created, it's time to carry out the
inspection. The inspection team must observe all work processes and equipment
closely, looking for possible workplace hazards including:
• Inadequate machine guards
• Malfunctioning safety equipment
• Absence of a well-stocked first aid kit
• Biological hazards such as parasites
• Environmental issues like fumes or radiation
• Physical hazards such as wear and tear of equipment, heat, electrical hazards, etc.
• Risks to the mental health of workers such as stress or workplace bullying
• Poor work practices like using machinery without adequate safety training,
overloading equipment, using defective tools, repairing or adjusting equipment
while it’s on, and more
3. Review the Data
• Once the inspection data is collected, it needs to be
reviewed and analyzed to find gaps and take actions to
mitigate the hazards and improve workplace practices.
• Any trends in the collected data would help identify the
root causes of issues and make changes at the enterprise
level to prevent the hazards from occurring again. A cloud-
based, automated inspection solution would make this
work simple and efficient, analyzing trends and generating
reports to make planning corrective actions easy.
4. Implement Corrective Actions
• The whole process of inspecting your workplace for safety issues would be
pointless if you don't use the data to help prevent risk.
• In your inspection report, include a section proposing the actions to be taken
to correct the hazards found. For example, if a certain work practice involves
safety risk, the proposed action may be a recommendation to reform the
practice. Or, if the data shows a concerning trend, a team may need to be
instituted to investigate the matter further.
• Make sure your proposed actions are comprehensive, including the
delegation of work for all the proposed actions, deadlines for the actions to
be completed, and a way to report the progress in this work by providing the
teams responsible for corrective actions with the contact information of the
stakeholders to report to.
5. Follow Up on Your Findings
• Schedule regular follow-ups to ensure that your findings
from the safety inspection are being acted upon. When the
proposed deadlines for the actions pass, ask the relevant
teams for progress reports and follow up with stakeholders
to check if the solution is working.
• If a hazard persists despite taking action, it might be that
the root cause of the issue was not eliminated, making
further analysis necessary. Remember that this is a
continuous process and not something that can be
forgotten once the inspection has been done.
