What are Critical Control Verifications and How to Maintain Oversight

Maintaining workplace safety is a critical concern for industries with significant risks, such as mining, construction, and manufacturing. The key to achieving this goal lies in effective safety measures that protect employees and mitigate hazards. 

Controls are the measures that prevent, arrest, or mitigate bad events. When those controls relate to catastrophic dangers and they are either the last line of defence, or where they contribute to keeping a multitude of hazards in check, they form part of an organisation's C ritical Controls.

This is where critical control verifications become relevant.

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This article will explore the role of these verifications in managing workplace safety, the challenges organisations face in maintaining oversight, and how your team can implement strategies for continuous improvement. Let’s look at how these aspects play into building great safety management practices and reduce the likelihood of incidents.

‍What are critical control verifications?

Critical control verifications are assessments conducted to ensure that key safety measures, your critical controls, are effectively implemented and functioning as intended to mitigate risks in various industries. These verifications are done through inspections, documenting results, and initiating corrective actions.

How do critical control verifications differ from critical control measures?

Critical Control Measures refer to specific actions or preventive steps designed to mitigate or prevent significant hazards within a particular industry or workplace, sometimes just called ‘Critical Controls’. For example, these measures could include installing safety equipment, implementing specific operational procedures, or establishing guidelines to reduce risks associated with particular tasks.

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Critical Control Verifications, on the other hand, are the assessments or checks carried out to ensure these control measures are functioning as intended. They evaluate whether the measures are effective, whether they are being properly implemented, and if they continue to mitigate the risks as designed.

Besides their stated function, the further purpose of these verifications is to keep organisations accountable and to be able to demonstrate actual control of risks when an external audit is conducted. In fact, the practice is required to meet several international regulations and standards, e.g. Australia’s WHS, UK’s COMAH, OSHA’s PSM, and ISO 45001.

‍Critical control verifications through PDCA

Critical control verifications are a key component of the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle of Critical Control Management (CCM). This cycle provides a structured approach to identifying, implementing, and continuously improving critical control measures, ensuring their effectiveness in mitigating workplace hazards. While we won't dive into a full review of CCM here, some brief context on the PDCA cycle is useful:

1. Plan: Identify Major Unwanted Events (MUE) and designate critical controls.
2. Do: Set standards for implementing the controls and build the internal capabilities to do so.
3. Check: Here is where you perform your CCV via inspections, and evaluate the results.
4. Act: Review failures and near misses and adapt your safety practices.

Challenges in maintaining oversight

Maintaining oversight of critical control verifications poses several challenges for organisations:

1. Inconsistent Reporting: Is a formalised methodology in place? In many cases, reporting processes are inconsistent across departments or sites, making it difficult to compare and evaluate data effectively. This inconsistency can lead to gaps in your awareness of how well critical controls are functioning.
2. Communication Gaps: Is there a way for everyone to stay on the same page? All stakeholders must understand the status of critical controls. Communication gaps between different teams or levels of management can lead to misaligned priorities, delayed responses, or overlooked issues.
3. Difficulty in Tracking Data: What is the format of the data? Organisations often face challenges in tracking and analysing data related to critical control verifications. This difficulty can stem from a lack of centralised systems or automated tools, making it hard to gain insights into historical trends and measure the effectiveness of current controls.

Strategies for effective oversight

Do you believe that you have an effective strategy for verifying your critical controls? Maintaining oversight of critical control verifications can be challenging, but there are several strategies that can help organisations streamline the process and ensure continuous improvement:

Utilise purpose-made software

Let’s look at myosh's Critical Control Management (CCM) module as an example of a system for handling verification processes that enables real-time data tracking and makes reporting more accessible:

• Digital Bow-Tie: The Bow-Tie model updates automatically based on inspection questionnaire responses, providing a clear visual representation of control status. This allows teams to monitor the effectiveness of critical controls at a glance.
• Smart Inspections: Frequent processes such as inspections automatically create verification records, ensuring that control measures are consistently evaluated and documented.
• The Rules Engine: Pre-configured processes trigger automatically when controls are compromised, allowing for timely responses and mitigating potential risks. This replaces the need for a human actor to perform multiple administrative follow-up tasks manually.

The primary advantage of a purpose-made solution like this is to tuck most of the complexity into the back-end of an automated system. With a lower administrative burden, safety managers and inspectors are better able to focus their efforts on priority tasks and are less likely to let something slip.

Establish standardised processes

As implied above, setting up consistent methods for conducting verifications, including reporting formats and schedules, is crucial. Standardised processes help ensure uniform data collection, facilitating comparison and evaluation across departments or sites. You don’t necessarily need a one-size-to-fit-all procedure for all your departments/sites - it is sufficient that the data is at least inter-compatible in its format so that you can conduct meaningful analysis and comparisons. For example, aligning risk matrix scores across sites/departments so that a score of "5", for example, carries the same risk weight everywhere.

Promote collaboration

Are all your team members sufficiently involved? Encouraging teamwork between different levels of management and operational teams helps align priorities, facilitates timely responses, and ensures all stakeholders are aware of the status of critical controls. This also plays into finding a uniform solution that works across all departments and sites and it is crucial to implement a system that lends itself to collaboration on a technical level. This means not relying on tedious email chains but to have document review workflows that involve the relevant people in an organised manner.

A path to safer workplace with myosh

Maintaining effective oversight of critical control verifications is essential for workplaces that must maintain critical controls. By implementing strategies such as utilising purpose-made software, standardising processes, and promoting collaboration, your organisation can streamline its CCM practices and gain greater insights into the effectiveness of your safety measures.

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myosh’s critical control management software offers a comprehensive solution for integrating verification processes into everyday workflows. This software provides real-time tracking, automated reporting, and a performance dashboard, allowing organisations to maintain compliance, transparency, and continuous improvement.

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Start your free trial of myosh today and get a demo to see how a digital bow-tie, together with smart inspections and a rules engine, can make the world’s difference in managing critical control verifications.

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