The Role of Safety Audits in Preventing Workplace Accidents

I’m going to say something that’s going to upset some people.

There should be no safety audits in a factory setting.

Why is that?

Because safety audits are like restaurant inspections. Everyone who has ever worked in a restaurant knows the dirty little secret: when you know a health inspector is showing up, everyone makes sure to give the kitchen a deeper cleaning so it will pass inspection.

Once the inspection is over for the year, the kitchen goes back to its usual standard of cleanliness.

Which means, if they clean extra hard for the inspector, what’s going on the rest of the year in the room where people are alone with your food?

It’s the same with safety audits. People will go about their business the same way they always have, but they’ll clean up their act when it’s time for a safety audit or OSHA inspection

Which means the level of acceptable safety practices during an audit and the rest of the year are

Shaping up for safety audits ends up putting people at risk for the rest of the year.

Safety is An All-Day, Everyday, Everybody Issue

Everyone should practice perfect safety all year round. No breaks, no days off, no exceptions.

Remember, safety is one of my four non-negotiables, so everyone who worked for me had to be indoctrinated in the same way. That was included in the interview and onboarding to drive it home. This gave us a lot of latitude in discipline. Someone couldn’t say they didn’t know it was a requirement or feign ignorance if they committed a safety violation.

It also meant safety was everyone’s responsibility, not just an auditor’s or a manager’s. Meaning, if you’re standing next to a problem, it’s yours to resolve. And if you don’t resolve it, you’re responsible for it.

For example, if someone runs a cord across a walkway to power a fan, that’s a tripping hazard, and the person who ran the cord is responsible if someone trips over it.

But, if you’re standing next to that cord, watching people trip over it and you don’t do something about it, you’re responsible for it as well.

Because safety is responsibility. Not a manager’s, not the safety officer’s. In fact, there shouldn’t even <em>be</em> a safety officer, because everyone is a safety officer.

In other words, if you see someone operating in an unsafe manner, it’s your responsibility to point it out to them. It didn’t matter who it was or whether they outranked you. If they’re being unsafe, <em>you</em> are responsible for their safety just as much as they’re responsible for yours.

Here’s an example:

We built into the workflow that whenever you started your shift and took over a machine, you had to do all the safety checks before you started. You did this every day, every shift, every eight hours It didn’t matter if someone had just performed the safety checks 30 minutes earlier and had to leave because of illness, you had to do them all again.

That became an everyday procedure, and we made sure everyone followed it, no matter what.

But to give it a little juice, twice a year, I would have random safety inspections by independent people. This was different from a safety audit because no one knew when they were coming, which meant there was no extra-special effort to be safe. They had to be safe every day because I might schedule them only a couple months apart.

In one of our companies in Michigan, we had 1,000-ton presses. The operators were responsible for checking that the dies were properly seated and lagged down at the beginning of each shift. One day, some jackass started his shift and didn’t do the necessary safety inspections, and one of the bolts actually fell out.

The die didn’t fall out, but the fact that one of the bolts did meant this guy didn’t perform the proper checks. You can imagine what a 55,000-pound die dropping out of a press is going to do — it’s going to squash someone flat.

Luckily, that didn’t happen because it was only one bolt, but if one could come out, the rest were bound to follow.

So I pushed to fire the guy, but the managers talked me out of it, and we were forced to keep him.

Then he went off and said the pressure of the organization was too much for him psychologically, which cost us a small fortune to navigate. He went on worker’s comp and sued us for personal injury. If I had just been allowed to fire him over this safety breach, we could have avoided it all.

What Happens When You Have Daily Safety Practices?

Once, during a surprise inspection, an inspector found an unlabeled bottle of fluid in a janitorial closet. Afterward, the safety committee reviewed the existing safety program. They updated it to ensure that there could be no unlabeled bottles in the building — no one knew what it was, what it could do, how dangerous it was, or anything that a label would tell us. So they made the rule that eliminated that as a possibility.

I made sure we had money for this kind of activity in the budget, and that our expenditures were included in the official financials, including the remediations and everything associated with them. After all, some remediation might require capital, so keeping executives informed about what needed to happen made it easier to get the capital when we needed it.

In the end, our safety inspectors found a lot fewer problems in our plants because we made safety a daily practice and requirement. We were able to measure our consecutive days of zero accidents in years and avoided accidents and injuries because we practiced safety. And we never needed safety audits to accomplish that.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website https://damarshall.consulting  and connect with me on or https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-marshall-4290531b