Does anyone here use inspections to drive compliance within their company?

  • 3 February 2023
  • 7 replies
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Userlevel 2
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So we use inspections for creating reports, but haven’t really used it for anything else.

Wondering if anyone’s got experience in using inspections for driving compliance.

Thanks in advance!


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Good to see you again @The droids you're looking for!

So for my company, we use inspections regularly for compliance checks, but I have found that it’s got some drawbacks. The regularity of inspections drove, in some ways, a culture of micro-management by completing arbitrary checks.

I do believe that there are a few reasons why the simple inspection has lost its way:

  1. No access to insights from the information within inspections.
  2. No visibility of inspections once they’re completed or the quality of these inspections.
  3. Limited feedback for the individuals completing inspections.
  4. No actions or improvements as an outcome of inspections.
Userlevel 3
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Hi @The droids you're looking for 👋🏼

In case this interests you, we also have the Public Library, where you might find templates that can help you get started with compliance checks.

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This was our initial use case for iAuditor / SafetyCulture when we started in 2017.  We wanted near real-time information on compliance with internal policy requirements.  Essentially, we used our site-based HSE Advisors to complete inspections against key safety topics in templates populated by the central HSE team.  Initially, dubbed our ‘Leading Indicators’ we were able to gather data that showed us where the organization wasn’t complying; with the intent of adjusting the management system accordingly - whether that be training, revision of requirements, etc.

We have expanded this into a wider assurance and verification process that all personnel can contribute to - either in peer to peer conversations, or with frontline leaders and supervisors observing work with curated templates.

Userlevel 1
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Hi Droids,

Our current use case centers on compliance in the HSE realm while our operations folks have really embraced using the platform for more mission-focused inspections and qualifications support.  Beginning last year, we dug into key elements of our leading KPI’s, specifically JHAs, toolbox talks, and hazard ID reporting (Good Catch/Good Save).  Based on those alone and combined with improvements in data export and presentation, we started to focus on improving compliance in these areas to see if there was a concurrent decrease in incident occurrence and real or potential severity (long story short, the inverse correlation presented beautifully about three months after we went live with our reporting system).  

These days, we are starting to tie answers within a specific daily template (a company-specific personal hazard assessment for general conditions) to various aspects of compliance, namely higher-level risk assessments and PPE use.  We can essentially see who needs to be doing particular compliance elements by tagging their responses within Power BI to create the denominator of the equation while their actual completion gives us a compliance rate.  Once you have the data in your hands, it becomes a simple matter of deciding if you’re simply after completion v. non-completion or if you want to see specific responses.  We’ve found BI to be a great tool to that end, but there are a number of means of getting to the finish line.

MG

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@Matt Gregory - sounds like we are using the tool for very similar purposes.  One of the things we have seen is that sites that ‘find things to fix’, with broad participation and which use their data - have better safety results.

Userlevel 2
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Good stuff, thanks for sharing your insights @Jason Wilson @Matt Gregory!

Userlevel 1
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@Matt Gregory - sounds like we are using the tool for very similar purposes.  One of the things we have seen is that sites that ‘find things to fix’, with broad participation and which use their data - have better safety results.

@Jason Wilson - Definitely, and that mindset is pervasive once established.  In our case, the Good Catch/Good Save program was the first major policy/program upgrade I brought to the team, and once they took hold of it and owned it as their own, it was a lot simpler to implement different safety initiatives to better support our field folks.