How to Prepare Your Business for Any Audit

Anita Adiraj

Last updated 30/09/2020

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Engage leadership 

1. Consistency. We have learned that the impact of quality depends more on this decision than any other: What is the North Star Metric for the company? Is it to be more profitable? Is it to expand market share? Work it out and repeat this message everywhere and anywhere in your business. 
2. Social proof. Catch criticism from clients, workers, and providers. Utilize these soundbites to show the master plan when the impact is heavy.
3. Reciprocity. What does your administration group care about? It's probably not going to be the number of reports your group is making. They are bound to think about benefits, effectiveness, and hazard. Converse with them about something they will think about.
4. Liking. "We don't care for them." This is the response to an overview of more than 30 top executives about how they feel about the quality capacity. This is an extremely hard test to survive. Individuals like the individuals who like them or who they see as companions. Discovering shared conviction with the initiative's objectives, adulating their victories, and building a positive affinity will assist you with taking advantage of your relationship with them.
5. Authority. Work with your promoting group to build up your own image. Your authority will be significantly less slanted to peruse your strategy archive than organization news out there for the world to see. They certainly will peruse the organization's public statements, news stories, and company’s social media pages. Lift your notoriety in the organization by advancing your bits of knowledge, thoughts, and ventures to an outer, worldwide crowd.
6. One central policy. Numerous organizations have many approaches that simply gotten overpowering so individuals switch off and read nothing. Make a solitary approach that is focused on the initiative, which at that point connects to all others to restrict the over-burden.

Empower employees

7. Develop your sales pitch. Shadow a superstar sales rep. They speak the language of the customer and leadership. Replicate this language in the boardroom, policy documents, and when with the auditor. 
8. Focus on why than what. Such a large number of quality practitioners send around messages that there is an audit without disclosing why it makes a difference to their representatives. Start all interchanges with the 5 Why's and you'll in a split second notification an expansion in commitment.
9. Factual vs emotional communications: Qualsys finds data and statistics are much more powerful than emotional messages. 
10. A holistic management system. Put quality, health and safety, environment, information security, risk, business continuity, etc. policies, processes, and procedures all in a single system. All training requirements, issues, equipment, suppliers, audits, etc, associated with the policies should be managed through this central system.  
11. No incidents is not a good thing. No news is not good news. It may just mean they haven't been reported or haven't been fed back to the correct department. Tools such as Kiosk by Qualsys make it easier than ever for employees to collect incident, near-miss, issue data into their management system within several clicks. 
12. Don’t bore with the detail. The average length of a quality manual is 21,000 words. Make the information easy to digest by breaking it up into headers, bullet points and summary sections. 
13. Targeted quality management. Send specific notifications little and often  to the people who need it rather than more general catch-all emails. Your engagement will increase rapidly. 
14. 360 reviews. It can be very hard to take criticism from peers when the feedback is anonymous. However, nobody is perfect and it can be incredibly beneficial to hear some ideas from peers and empowering to know what you're doing well. Plan at least one 360 reviews per year to identify weaknesses and opportunities for personal development. This will also demonstrate to your auditor your commitment to continuous improvement.  
15. Routine audit program. By "routine" we don't mean monotonous and the same. We mean to plan a complete audit schedule that looks at how change is being managed, the management system, how well quality is embedded, and so on. Mix up the questions and the auditors to avoid bias and subjectivity. 

Managing the auditor

14. Give your auditor the keys. A real sign of confidence is to send your auditor access to your central management system with all of your policies, procedures, training records, risk assessments, supplier compliance records, audits, etc. With EQMS, you can lock down which areas of the system they see if there is something either confidential or sensitive you do not want them to access. 
15. Don't take it personally. Most auditors are trained in the latest techniques and processes. However, there is still a minority who will nitpick a small, insignificant detail. It's important everyone takes a risk-based approach, but if you're stuck with an auditor who has other ideas, don't take it personally.

Is this all we know? 

The key to a successful audit is context. What are the risks? What are the processes? What are the objectives of their business? 

Drop your queries to the comment section if you wish to know more about audits.

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