Comprehensive environmental, health, and safety (EHS) auditing often has organizations caught between two pain points. Businesses are either drowning in findings from comprehensive audits or struggling to identify the truly high-risk issues among all the common recurring findings like blocked fire extinguishers or missing labels. This is where focused audits come in—not as a replacement for comprehensive audits but as a tactical complement that looks deeper into safety issues.
But what exactly makes a focused audit valuable? Let's explore the key benefits and applications of this targeted approach to EHS auditing.
When focused audits make strategic sense
In high-hazard industries like construction or manufacturing, focused audits provide a valuable way to allocate limited resources and budget. Instead of attempting to cover every possible safety issue, these targeted assessments concentrate on activities with the highest potential for serious incidents or fatalities.
Many organizations structure safety programs around Life-Saving Rules (LSRs), critical protocols designed to prevent serious injuries and fatalities. A focused audit can be geared around those rules, such as:
- Tie-off requirements when working at height.
- Lifting plans when using cranes.
- Lockout/tagout procedures for machine work.
- Controls for confined space entry.
By aligning audit efforts with these rules and the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities, companies reinforce the importance of those life-saving focuses.
Similarly, on the environmental side, highly regulated sites with complex permits might benefit from focused scrutiny. Rather than lightly touching on it in a comprehensive audit, a focused approach allows auditors to go through every single line of those permits and evaluate everything being tracked and reported.
Root cause analysis
While a comprehensive audit might identify surface-level issues, a focused audit goes deeper. With a focused approach, auditors can:
- Conduct roundtable employee and management interviews.
- Review program documentation in more detail.
- Examine any internal reviews that the site has done over the years.
By conducting in-depth investigations, auditors can identify root causes that enable organizations to develop more effective improvement plans.
For example, in one comprehensive audit of an organization, a simple series of missed inspections was flagged. The focused audit revealed that the business didn't have a backup employee in place, so when somebody would go on vacation, inspections would be missed. Without the deeper investigation, this systemic issue might have remained hidden.
Consequences of not using an external auditor
The stakes can be high when organizations neglect auditing altogether. For example, a site acquired by a new company had failed to complete its Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) reporting for four years and Tier II reporting for 10 years before an environmental audit uncovered the issue. The business was unaware because stakeholders trusted that the EHS manager in charge was following procedures, but there was no one to verify this. Even well-intentioned EHS managers might not know a requirement, recognize what an industry best practice is, or understand agency interpretation. Without external verification, these gaps can persist for years, potentially resulting in huge fines.
External auditors bring unique values to the table, including:
- A broad view of what industry best practice looks like.
- Deep knowledge of what the regulatory requirements are.
- The ability to do focused, unbiased analysis and having that conversation with the frontline employee as well as the plant director and everybody in-between.
For organizations with established internal audit programs, external auditors can still provide value by helping to upskill internal audit teams or providing fresh insights on better audit techniques.
Ultimately, organizations want to make programmatic changes that are going to be high impact. Focused audits enable companies to direct resources strategically to the areas of greatest risk or concern, yielding deeper insights and more targeted improvements. By complementing comprehensive audits with focused analysis, organizations can ensure both regulatory compliance and meaningful safety improvements for highest-risk activities.
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