When anyone here’s the word Audit they immediately cringe and feel they did something wrong. Imagine working on the frontline and doing your job to the best of your ability based on the way you were trained. One day your supervisor pulls you in and says “Based on a recent audit you have been doing a number of things wrong and need to change immediately”. In most cases that supervisor had no idea that things were complying with what the audit showed. What are the ramifications around this approach? The ramifications of this type of interaction, which happens daily in industry, go far beyond the findings that were presented in the audit. The frontline worker is frustrated because they have been accused of doing something wrong that they didn’t even know about and the supervisor has another thing that they have to add to their long list of hourly tasks. Both of these outcomes create a negative culture and reinforces the disdain of the dreaded “Audit”. Audits have their purpose but are lagging indicators of processes not being followed. The perfect audit is one with no findings which should be the focus of the audit in the first place. How do you create the perfect Audit? What if the frontline workers could do the audit themselves? Doesn’t it make more sense to use an audit as a training tool and inform workers how things are supposed to be done prior to doing an audit? By doing this the “official” audit now becomes a simple validation of what is already known which is the true intent of an audit. Reimagining audits from a frontline worker perspective helped us better understand the real effect audits have on workplace culture and by empowering the frontline workers with transparency the audit findings have been dramatically reduced and the culture has improved. Ready to learn more about our re-imagined Audit and Inspection functionality? Request a Demo today. Comments are closed.
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