For many organisations and businesses, it is easy to forget about office and workplace inspection. In favour of serving the client and putting ‘business needs’ first, managers and building supervisors can sometimes put inspection of the actual working environment behind other priorities.
Whilst this may be a short-term solution that ensures the customer is cared for, in the long-term it can expose problems that are in need of attention. Business magnate Sir Richard Branson is famously quoted as saying: “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients”. In the modern workplace this could not be more important. With the average time spent with one employer decreasing, it has become ever more important to show your employees that you put their needs and requirements high up on the list of priorities.
Office and workplace inspection today can be a very different inspection to the one done even no less than 20 years ago. The Covid-19 pandemic has put an emphasis on health and biosafety with shared workspaces at particular risk for transmission of biohazards. The notion of ‘hotdesking’ also means that it becomes harder to track the users’ needs and requirements, with less tailoring options for each individual. Alongside redesigned office spaces in line with 21st century layouts and designs, new and advanced machinery in factories, modern safety protocols in the workplace and a greater focus on international and industry standards; there is lots for office and workplace inspection to catch up on since the 20th century. Luckily for today’s building managers and organisations, paperless inspection using mobile devices has meant that office and workplace inspection can now be undertaken digitally. No longer do managers have to walk about the stuffy corridors with a lengthy paper checklist to fill out, inspecting each and every square inch due to poor inspection methods – paperless office and workplace inspection drastically modernises the process. For modern factories, office spaces or outdoor working areas, there is now at last a contemporary inspection solution.
Paperless solutions for inspection most often make use of mobile devices in the form of tablets and/or smartphones running an inspection application. Like any other consumer mobile device, the application can run with data inputs from the user, which in this case can be text, images, scanned information etc. The user is able to select relevant checklists that need completing which upon opening contains the necessary information, tools and instruction to complete the inspection report. Features such as scanning barcodes or using speech-to-text services mean that data capture is much quicker than writing, whereas taking pictures and annotating them can be another information dimension to analyse later. The pictures can like any manual, standard or regulation, be attached to the checklist as reference material. For each inspection, this ensures that the officer or inspector has the necessary information at their disposal. For inspection of i.e., ergonomic principles in the design of work systems, the inspector can refer to the ISO (International Organization for Standards) standard ISO 6385, whereas another inspector may have ISO 45001 attached to their report as part of a broader OH&S (Occupational Health and Safety) building inspection.
