No matter how needed and important they may be, safety audits are always a big investment of time and energy to make sure they’re done correctly. A good safety audit will encompass every aspect of your facility and warehouse, making sure that workers on any shift, in any department, can perform their duties safely and effectively.

But even for smaller facilities, this process could take a long time. If you need some help planning out your workplace’s next upcoming safety audit, we’ve got a few tips here to help get your team and facility ready:

Know What You’re Investigating

A good starting place for any warehouse safety audit is to know your goals, and what you need to inspect. Safety audits tend to go farther than a safety inspection in that they both investigate physical installations inside a workplace and also checking things like work processes, previous results of safety inspections, and so on. Before you begin a safety audit, you should take some time to really finalize what exactly you’ll be studying and examining during the audit to save time and make the process smoother.

Customize Your Approach For Different Areas

In order to make sure your audit covers all of your potential bases and provides the best amount of feedback, customizing your audit to serve different areas of your workplace would provide the most accurate information. Your employee’s safety practices would need to be inspected and audited differently than the placement of your industrial storage solutions, for example, or you’d probably be looking for different items of interest out on the actual shop floor than you would be in the warehouse locker room. Whatever your audit includes, remember that one size doesn’t fit all, and you need to remember to customize your approaches.

Know The Standards You’re Auditing Against

While a lot of safety standards can be common sense – no exposed cables, safely secured railings, and so on – there are a lot of specific Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards that need to be kept in mind during your audit. Do some research to find the most appropriate OSHA standard and code to base your audit upon, and use this as a guideline for everything you have to inspect going forward.

Remember To Act On Your Findings

After the audit has completed, perhaps the most important advice you can remember is to act on your findings. Safety audits won’t do you any good if nobody implements changes and improvements based on what was discovered – remember to prepare an action list to work on your findings, and you’ll quickly find your next audit goes even more smoothly.