How to Do an OSHA Mock Survey
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, everyone has the right to a safe workplace. Employers, for instance, are required to protect their employees from safety and health hazards that may be found in work environments or that are affiliated with particular job duties. OSHA publishes lists of safety guidelines and regulations for various types of workplaces and safety issues. Many employers like to check their companies against the OSHA rules to ensure that they are compliant and that they are effectively maintaining safe work environments. One of the ways that employers can accomplish this is by performing in-house OSHA mock surveys.
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Instructions
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Identify the OSHA guidelines that are applicable to your line of work. Not every rule published by OSHA will pertain to the type of work that you do. For instance, the safety standards in place for construction workers are not the same safety standards that apply to office staff.
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Choose the focus of your survey and decide which safety categories you want to perform the mock OSHA survey on. You might want to do a mock OSHA survey for fire and chemical safety procedures, say. Or you may want to conduct an audit on bloodborne pathogen safety. You could also opt to do an overall survey by selecting one or two safety topics from each category that OSHA identifies for your line of work.
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Develop a survey tool. The survey tool is what you will use to capture and collect the information during your review of the work environment. Design the survey tool in a quantitative format, using checkboxes for "Yes" or "No," "Compliant" or "Noncompliant." This helps you perform the survey more efficiently while gathering quantitative data. Create the mock questions based on the focus of your survey. For instance, if you are doing a survey on housekeeping, your questions might include "Are walking surfaces free from debris?" or "Are any spills left unswept?". Each question or item on your survey tool must have a checkbox for the corresponding answer.
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Begin your inspection. Do not tell others in the workplace that you are performing the survey in advance or else you might not get an accurate portrayal of what the environment is really like on a day-to-day basis.
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Stay objective. Even if you do not want to check the "Noncompliant" box for a particular item contained in the survey tool, it is unethical to manipulate data or lie about something being compliant when it isn't. Remember that this survey is a mock survey. As such, it is used to let you know what your organization does well and what areas need to be improved upon.
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Analyze the data after the survey. Count up all of your "Yes," "No," "Compliant" or "Noncompliant" boxes and determine a percentage for compliance.
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Generate a report that details the areas of compliance and noncompliance. Your report can then be given to your supervisor for review. It can also be used to provide staff with context for safety training initiatives. Make sure you report the statistics exactly as they were captured on the survey tool.
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Tips & Warnings
Always keep a record of your mock surveys and include the dates that they were conducted on. Also include the names of the person or persons conducting them. It is a good idea to get into the habit of documenting your mock surveys because OSHA may at some point want to see how you are managing your workplace.
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