ABSTRACT
Many of the commercially available auditing systems provide a quantitative assessment based on a wide and diverse range of questions. Although the questions themselves are very relevant, the systems may fall down at the user level. This is because the user and the person who completes the assessment is typically a manager or group of managers within the location being audited. More often than not, in my experience, the audit is carried out almost entirely (and sometimes only) by the organization’s safety or environmental manager who may find that his or her personal performance rating depends on the outcome. Usually, these assessments are carried out in an office without any involvement from the other employees. It must be remembered, therefore, that these audit results actually represent a management view of the situation and are likely to be somewhat optimistic and one-sided. The most essential part of any audit is the verification and opinion sampling step, and this is the step that is so often missing from some of the “self-audit” processes. It is this activity and this activity alone, which has the ability to transform the management view into one that more closely aligns with what actually happens. It is a statement of the obvious to say that the quality of any sampling process will affect the quality of the output of that process. A sample of 1 employee in a population of 10 will be more likely to give a representative result than taking a sample of 1 employee in 500. To give credibility to their conclusions the auditors should set themselves targets of the number of people that they are aiming to talk to in the organization. Included in these figures will be the discussions that take place both in the formal and informal parts of the audit process. Figure 13.1 gives an indication of the approximate number of personal discussions that an audit needs to achieve for the results to have statistical significance for given sizes of population.
