You know how some bozo in traffic pulls a real aggressive move and you just wish there was a cop up ahead to stop them? But you are let down almost every time.
At work, I supervise our auditing team. We audit our sites for safety and environmental compliance about every three years. The audit teams are usually 2-3 people for 5 days. Lop off a day for pre-meeting, plant tour and closing meeting and a half-day to travel home on Friday and you basically have 3.5 days of actual auditing. EHS&S is a very broad function with many compliance aspects. Like any audit then, it is a sampling of current conditions and conformance. We’d need a much larger team and two months to look at and verify everything. Yet, when something goes wrong, the evil eye always goes right to the auditing program: “How come our auditors didn’t pick this up?” Sigh. It’s our fault again.
We actually spent the last year trying to redesign our audit program. One irritating piece of feedback on the journey was that our external auditors were "not good enough" and that we needed internal auditors. And the reason the externals were not good enough was because “they missed things.”
Except for today. Today the cop was there to pull the guy over.
Today we were asked to pull the last audit report for a site that had a serious near miss event – one where an employee nearly lost his life. “Groan,” I thought. “We’re going to get blamed again for missing all of the links in the error chain that become so obvious when a near miss happens.” But not this time. This time, the audit report from three years ago identified one of the same crucial non-compliances that led to our near miss. Today, at least, it was harder to blame the audit program. I’m going home relieved for that small gift.
At work, I supervise our auditing team. We audit our sites for safety and environmental compliance about every three years. The audit teams are usually 2-3 people for 5 days. Lop off a day for pre-meeting, plant tour and closing meeting and a half-day to travel home on Friday and you basically have 3.5 days of actual auditing. EHS&S is a very broad function with many compliance aspects. Like any audit then, it is a sampling of current conditions and conformance. We’d need a much larger team and two months to look at and verify everything. Yet, when something goes wrong, the evil eye always goes right to the auditing program: “How come our auditors didn’t pick this up?” Sigh. It’s our fault again.
We actually spent the last year trying to redesign our audit program. One irritating piece of feedback on the journey was that our external auditors were "not good enough" and that we needed internal auditors. And the reason the externals were not good enough was because “they missed things.”
Except for today. Today the cop was there to pull the guy over.
Today we were asked to pull the last audit report for a site that had a serious near miss event – one where an employee nearly lost his life. “Groan,” I thought. “We’re going to get blamed again for missing all of the links in the error chain that become so obvious when a near miss happens.” But not this time. This time, the audit report from three years ago identified one of the same crucial non-compliances that led to our near miss. Today, at least, it was harder to blame the audit program. I’m going home relieved for that small gift.