What an audit is, honestly #
A quality audit scores a site against its specification, area by area, usually on a simple scale, usually monthly, usually by a supervisor or account manager who also has ten other things to do that day. It is a sample of a service that is delivered every weekday, so it carries all the weaknesses of a sample.
That matters commercially. When a client's own walk-round contradicts your score, the disagreement is rarely about standards. It is about which day, which corridor and which hour.
Why the report takes a day #
The report is not written, it is reconstructed, from sources that were never designed to be combined.
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Attendance
From site sheets that may still be in a van.
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Periodic work
From a schedule that lives somewhere else and is updated by hand.
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Audit scores
From a spreadsheet with a tab per site and a naming convention that has drifted.
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Incidents and requests
From messages, email and a phone call somebody took in a car park.
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Last month's actions
From whoever remembers agreeing to them.
The assembly is the cost. Almost none of the time goes on judgement, and almost all of it goes on finding things, reconciling two spellings of the same site, and working out whether a task was actually done or merely scheduled.
What a good report is doing #
Contract retention, and the renewal conversation a year ahead of time. The client's contact will eventually be asked whether this is working. Everything in the report is evidence for that answer.
Which is why the report cannot be fully mechanical. A table of scores with no narrative invites the reader to find the lowest number and ask about it. A report that says what happened, what was done and what is still open turns the same numbers into a case.
Keep safety duties out of it #
A quality audit measures cleanliness against a specification. It is not a health and safety assessment, and it is worth being firm about that distinction internally.
Controlling exposure to substances hazardous to health under COSHH, assessing risks as HSE sets out, and managing lone working are duties that sit with the employer no matter what a site scored this month. Conflating the two produces a folder that looks like compliance and is not.
Which parts run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Scheduling audits so every site is covered at the right frequency
- Reminding whoever owes an audit this month
- Recording scores against a fixed specification
- Pulling attendance and completed periodic work into one place, which is the bulk of the day
- Carrying open actions forward from the previous month
- Producing the same report format for every contract
- Varying where and when an audit samples, so it stays honest. Partly: randomising is rules, judging where to look is not
Needs a person
- Explaining a bad month
- Deciding whether an issue is a training problem, a staffing problem or a specification problem
Getting the second one wrong is how contracts are lost.
A useful test #
Pick a site and try to answer three questions from your records alone, without asking anybody.
- Was every scheduled visit attended last month
- Was every periodic task completed
- What is still open from the last review
If that takes more than a few minutes, the report is expensive for a structural reason rather than a personal one.
Count the hours it takes across every contract before deciding to change anything. The free tools will do the arithmetic, and the same underlying records determine how painful a complaint call is to answer.