While ISO internal audits may not appear too difficult at first glance, if an auditor is inexperienced or unqualified, it can be easy to overlook key non-conformances and miss out on the significant ROI of well-designed internal audits.
If you’re not following the appropriate steps for completing a thorough, unbiased ISO internal audit, this can unnecessarily waste time, money and resources on a non-value-adding process. You may also risk making costly oversights, which will need to be revisited and amended, setting you back in reaching your business’ compliance goals.
This considered, rather than conducting ISO internal audits themselves, organisations often outsource assistance from an experienced ISO consultant. Helping you every step of the way, an ISO consultant provides you with a new perspective and impartial advice, while also making sure you avoid the mistakes organisations commonly make along the way.
Overview of ISO Internal Audits
ISO internal audits assess an organisation’s overall business practices, including its quality and risk management systems, against the requirements of one or more ISO standards. By doing this, companies can evaluate how efficient and compliant their existing processes are, highlighting any shortcomings and making realistic, practical action plans that support continual improvement.
When it comes to achieving and maintaining ISO certification, conducting regular internal audits is a key requirement. While this may seem like a hassle, this expectation has been established for a good reason, in that it encourages organisations to constantly monitor, review and refine their systems. After analysing relevant information, organisations can see their progress towards compliance goals, helping them pinpoint areas that need to be strengthened.
While a checklist can provide companies with guidance, this standardised approach often doesn’t take into account a business’ unique vision, strategy and requirements or changing circumstances and is often strongly focussed on compliance and not busines improvement. If this is an option you’re considering, it’s important to take such criteria into account, tailoring the checklist to your specific circumstances and reviewing its effectiveness regularly.
Alternatively, on average, one in three corporate internal audit departments across the globe are now opting to outsource at least some of this process, gaining advice and/or guidance from an ISO consultant. This means they can conduct a thorough, objective internal audit that’s fully documented, confidential and less of a drain on employee’s time.
Common Mistakes Organisations Make
The ISO internal auditing process isn’t always as straightforward as it seems, and it’s not uncommon for organisations to make costly mistakes along the way. However, with the appropriate planning, guidance and value-driven approach, your business can minimise drawbacks, eliminate avoidable costs, benchmark your processes and get ISO certified sooner.
1. Focusing Purely on ‘Ticking Boxes’
While organisations may be tempted to get their ISO internal audit out of the way as soon as possible, cutting corners where they can, doing the bare minimum and hoping for the best can be both risky and ineffective.
Focusing purely on ‘ticking boxes’ might do the job now but, often, organisations find themselves achieving outcomes that simply aren’t sustainable. Rather, to get the most out of their ISO internal audit, companies need to recognise the value in developing maintainable, responsive integrated management systems that improve efficiencies across their operations.
If organisations see ISO internal audits as just another annoyance to get out of the way, rushing staff through the process, they’ll likely struggle to cultivate a culture of continual improvement and operational excellence – which is crucial in becoming certified. When future ISO external audits come around, they’ll also likely need to put in far more work to meet the minimum requirements again, as they may not have set a strong and flexible foundation.
2. Poor Planning
For the ISO internal auditing process to be optimised and effective, managers and supervisors need to be coordinated and unified in their efforts.
There are many audit paths that need to be pursued, so if management and supervisors aren’t working well cooperatively, it’s easy for efforts to become disjointed and for those auditing to miss key areas.
In overcoming this, organisations need to ensure they establish clear, shared direction that’s well understood by all of those involved before starting to audit processes and address nonconformities. With a detailed, realistic action plan, management can make sure the chosen approach is coordinated and collaborative, keeping everyone both on track and on the same page every step of the way.
3. Lack of Objectivity
Conducting an objective and unbiased ISO internal audit can be challenging and, often, this becomes all the more difficult if internal employees are completing the audit. In such instances, an employee’s pre-established understanding of the business’ processes and people can come into play, influencing what they report on or overlook – whether this is intentional or not.
If issues are disregarded and left to foster, they will catch up to you eventually, whether that’s in an ISO external audit or the like – which will only set your business back in reaching compliance goals and deadlines.
Thus, organisations need to keep effective communication central in everything they do, making sure that auditors and auditees are encouraged to be honest and impartial and ensuring there is a focus on systems rather than the individual when pointing out issues. When completing audits, businesses also need to strike a balance between ensuring key points aren’t skimmed over or critiques diluted and avoiding conflict with process owners.
This is where outsourcing auditing often becomes all the more valuable and preferable for organisations. An auditor from outside the business likely has no ties with, biases towards or alliances with company staff, meaning they can provide an impartial, fresh perspective on systems. After being reviewed by an outside source, processes and procedures that are widely accepted as the norm in an organisation may be found to have glaring non-conformances.
4. Unqualified Auditors
While it may be tempting to cut corners and save costs by getting an unqualified individual to conduct your business’ ISO internal audit, you risk wasting precious time, money and resources.
Without the appropriate experience and qualifications, an individual may lead your business down an entirely unnecessary path, where you end up focusing on areas that don’t need attention or overlooking key areas of non-conformance. This can drag out the ISO certification process, leaving staff tied up in redundant bureaucracy and paperwork.
Providing staff with sufficient, regular training is one option for minimising risk, supporting continual improvement and increasing the overall reliability of your auditing efforts.
An alternative is to enlist the help of a qualified ISO internal auditing professional to conduct some or all of your business’ audits. This way, you can be confident that it’s a reliable investment for your business.
5. Poor Communication
During any stage of the ISO internal auditing process, poor communication can hinder the overall effectiveness of your efforts.
If management communicates poorly with staff, this often becomes all the more obvious when performance isn’t up to the expected standard. In such instances, it’s important that those involved take ownership of issues and avoid displaying outward suspicion, transferring blame or using an accusatory tone when speaking with employees.
If an organisation doesn’t build strong communication channels and standards, they risk ending up with biased reports that overlook or underplay key points. This undermines the purpose of reporting in the first place, as the results won’t actually provide an accurate representation of the business’ existing systems, making continual improvement all the more difficult.
The resulting auditing report also needs to be written in a way that’s not only informative, detailing all of the important takeaways, but also clear, constructive and user-friendly. This means avoiding the use of a destructive and negative tone, while also ensuring it doesn’t include information that’s out-dated, misleading or factually incorrect.
With clear, conscious communication during every stage of the ISO internal auditing process, organisations can encourage and motivate their staff while also collecting more valuable and accurate insights from their efforts.
6. Lack of Continuity
ISO internal audits need to be completed regularly, as this helps organisations ensure they’re constantly looking for opportunities to improve the quality and effectiveness of their management systems. This means businesses can identify and start working to address any non-conformances or downfalls quickly, making continued compliance less of a burden than if such issues were left to foster and accumulate over months or years.
Organisations can fall into the trap of treating ISO certification as something they can ‘set and forget’ – but this just makes continued compliance all the more difficult and there is a mad rush prior to the external audit to ‘tick the right boxes’..
Maintaining ISO certification relies on businesses viewing compliance as an ongoing process. As such, even once they’ve reached their goals, organisations that get and stay certified don’t become complacent and, rather, remain committed to constantly improving their systems, whether this means:
- Regularly monitoring and reviewing the performance of systems;
- Providing additional training and education to employees;
- Communicating regularly and clearly with employees across all organisational levels to ensure they understand their role in achieving continued compliance.
By frequently auditing processes, over time, organisations can foster a strong corporate culture of continual improvement, making ongoing compliance less of a burden.
Get Started With Your ISO Internal Audit
Ready to start enjoying the benefits that come with effective, maintainable and compliant management systems? Get on track to doing just that by contacting our ISO consultants, who can complete a comprehensive, unbiased ISO internal audit of your processes.
Whether you’re looking to get compliant with ISO 9001, ISO 45001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001 or AS 9100 – we can help. Speak with our team to find out more.