Safety Audit Checklist for Factory Floors

An inspection checklist in the workplace is an effective tool that helps prevent accidents and safety incidents, while creating an atmosphere of responsibility and safety among both employees and customers.

Digital checklists can increase efficiency across your manufacturing business by streamlining 5S inspections, ISO compliance audits or general safety audits.

1. Identify Hazards
Manufacturing companies face numerous potential hazards. Some include slips, trips and falls which may result in serious employee injuries or significant financial liability for the company; others could include equipment and machinery which if mishandled may lead to injuries or even deaths.

Effective identification of risks requires using a comprehensive safety audit checklist, which should cover all essential elements of a factory that need regular inspection and provide evaluation of likelihood, severity and impact levels for every risk identified. Furthermore, this list should be regularly reviewed to detect any changes to the workplace that could create new hazards; workers must be involved in reviewing safety requirements and identifying potential hazards – this will ensure accurate and comprehensive audit results are reached.

2. Conduct a Walk-Through
An audit is a systematic approach designed to assess the safety measures in place within an environment, from personal protective equipment (PPE) and emergency procedures to creating an overall assessment of safety protocols.

Properly executed audits can assist businesses in meeting compliance standards ahead of a formal inspection and reducing risks from accidents or incidents. Furthermore, an effective audit will encourage employees to take their safety duties seriously by inspecting workplaces with care and consideration.

Get digital with your safety assessment process by using Device Magic’s mobile forms. Drag-and-drop question and answer segments, photos, free text fields and more into a customized form to create an efficient audit that can be accessed anywhere – even offline! Give it a try now; it’s simple!

3. Record Observations
As part of a safety audit walkthrough, it’s essential that observations be recorded in order to help identify compliance gaps and areas for improvement. Doing this helps motivate employees and create a safer work environment.

Manufacturers need to monitor whether employees are using personal protective equipment as intended, following proper procedures when handling machinery or materials, etc. A digital safety audit checklist helps record this data automatically and generate reports accordingly.

Customize a safety audit checklist template to include only those questions and items you want to examine during a walk-through inspection. Create workflows that involve team members in safety walks; additionally, an EHS software allows for timely inspection data analysis while making sharing reports simpler for key personnel.

4. Take Action
A properly designed checklist should go beyond listing items to be checked and providing space for comments; it should also provide clear guidance on the frequency with which each item needs to be monitored. If inspection results reveal that personal protective equipment or work areas are being neglected, for instance, then perhaps more targeted safety auditing needs to take place in those areas.

This process will likely require support from leadership at all levels of a company. Top management must verify that policies and procedures remain up-to-date and effective; production leaders can participate in safety audits to identify areas for improvement from a practical viewpoint; informed employees tend to engage more fully with this process and more readily take corrective actions when audit results are publically shared – helping foster a healthy safety culture in their workplaces.