Are Regular Full Health And Safety Audits Worth It

Full health and safety audit highlight areas of improvement before they become actual problems. In the absence of such a process, you will be sitting on a ticking time bomb. Many business owners, unfortunately, downplay the need for such an audit and as expected, they end up regretting the decision. This article highlights the reasons why you should embrace these audits. Read on to learn.

Customer Satisfaction

So many factors affect customer behaviour, top amongst them being health and safety concerns. You may have quality products and services but customers will stay away from your business if their safety and wellbeing is not guaranteed. 

For example, incidents such as food contamination or poor washroom hygiene create a bad reputation, keeping customers and prospects at bay.

You can win your customers satisfaction by maintaining higher standards of health and safety in your business. An audit will help you identify key areas of weaknesses. This allows you to make adjustments in your operations, increasing customer confidence in your business as a result.

Detect Risks On Time

Owing to the human factor in any business, accidents often lurk around workplaces. This could be from poor waste disposal, poor hand and personal hygiene, clutter and poor aeration, just to name a few. A regular audit on your premises identifies such situations, warning you early enough.

Compliance With Authorities

One of the key areas that the state checks when giving you a go-ahead to run a business is your health and safety compliance. 

Do you have enough protective gear if your staff need it? Are your premises cleaned to the maximum? Do you have poisonous gases leaking all over your business?

Basically, you will find yourself in trouble if you are found with anything that puts your clients and employees in danger. 

That is why you need to conduct full health and safety audits once in a while. They will highlight areas you need to work on to ensure full compliance. Failure to do so could lead to hefty fines or even withdrawal of your license.

Employee Awareness

Most accidents in a workplace could be avoided if your staff are well aware of the risks. Without knowledge in health and safety, the occupants of your building are oblivious. They do not worry about exposing themselves and their colleagues to potential risks.

They will easily carry germs from one surface to another if they do not understand the importance of handwashing. They also risk increasing falls when they leave objects lying around. 

A full health and safety audits solve this. After one, you can easily point out areas that your staff need training on. This way, you increase their awareness and make them accountable for their actions.

Save On Costs

Contrary to what many business owners think, regular audits by professionals save you costs. You might think setting aside a budget to do a thorough audit on your premise is expensive. But this is not the case. If anything, failure to have one ends up eating into your resources in many ways. How?

As mentioned above, audits detect health and safety issues long before they occur. With one, you can eliminate possible causes of illnesses and accidents. This ultimately saves you from doing repairs. You also do not have to worry about hospital bills from people getting hurt under your care. 

With a trusted auditor, you reduce the risks of incidents like fire that could cost you millions in lawsuits.

For Planning Purposes

Without planning, you put your business at risk of shutting down. How so? Planning documents your short term and long term goals and how to achieve them.

Proper planning also provides the direction of action, eliminating expensive impromptu decisions.

A well-conducted health and safety audit shines a light on all your operations. It shows how your activities affect the health of those involved, now and in future.

It then creates an avenue for you to do prior arrangements for things like the purchase of Protective Personal Equipment (PPE). You can identify areas of weaknesses such as employee unawareness and organize for training.

These are just some of the reasons your business needs regular full health and safety audits. You do not have to wait until you are in trouble with your local authorities or someone is injured on your premises. Seek the services of a reputable H&S auditing firm today and reap in bounds.

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