How to build a COVID-19 back-to-work audit in EQMS (with example checklist)

COVID-19 death rates are falling across the world. Plans to gradually ease the lockdown are being put in motion.

But quality professionals are now faced with a new responsibility.

As people return to offices, factories and company sites in the coming weeks, keeping down the basic reproduction number (R₀) of the virus will be crucial.

And it falls to quality managers and auditors to keep their colleagues as safe as they possibly can.

The Qualsys quality team has put together an example back-to-work checklist to help get your business ready.

Access it below, and learn how to build it into EQMS Audit Manager.

COVID-19 checklist

The prospect of reopening your place of business straight after a global emergency can be head-spinning.

A checklist is crucial if you are to plan effectively and reopen in a safe, compliant way.

The Qualsys quality team put together an example checklist to help you start your preparations.

Download COVID-19 back-to-work checklist PDF here

Note: No two businesses are the same!

This checklist is designed to cover a few core areas of consideration and should be supported by a thorough risk analysis of your specific business operation.

Building an audit

Audits are built, managed and completed within the Audit Manager module of EQMS.

Audits consist of 3 interlocking building blocks:

• Questions, which form...
• Checklists, which sit within...
• Audit types

Just click 'create audit' to get started.

You'll then be prompted to categorise your audit within a new or existing audit type.

Audit types are used to categorise your audits and tag relevant checklists to your audits and inspections.

For instance, you could have a series of clause-by-clause questions within an ISO 9001 checklist, tagged to the ISO 9001 audit type. This allows you to schedule a fresh ISO 9001 audit in seconds by creating a new audit and simply selecting the ISO 9001 audit type.

But in this case, to create a new COVID-19 back-to-work audit from scratch, we can create a new COVID-19 audit type.

It's then time to build a checklist for this audit type, consisting of the questions we'll want to answer during our audit.

Making an audit checklist

It's quick and easy to build the questions from our COVID-19 checklist into Audit Manager.

Simply build out the different sections of your audit and create questions on-the-fly to add into each section.

Add as many or as little questions as you think are relevant to your specific business operation.

Depending on your type of audit, you can set different response types, from a simple yes/no to large text fields and images for comprehensive responses.

For a checklist like this, a yes/no question type is perfect.

By breaking your audit into sections, you can then assign different parts of your audit to different personnel.

For instance, you may wish to assign your HR, procedural, hygiene and third-party questions separately to the personnel with most experience in these areas.

Once the checklist and your assigned auditors are ready, simply create an audit, select the COVID-19 audit type, and start your audit.

Each auditor will receive their designated questions to answer, and will be able to submit any additional notes and findings alongside their answers.

You could also configure your audit to automatically trigger an action for completion in Issue Manager if a finding is raised - for instance, a lack of a suitable disinfection policy on one of your sites could raise a task to put one in place.

Next steps

Access more coronavirus help and resources by downloading our 'COVID-19 and quality' toolkit: