SAFE Work Manitoba (SWMB), a division of the Manitoba WCB, is dedicated to the prevention of workplace injury and illness. Working with partners in the safety community, SWMB provides prevention education, safety programming, consulting, and strategic direction to create a culture of safety for Manitoba.

SWMB has established a standard for occupational safety and health in the province called SAFE Work Certified. SAFE Work Certified sets the standard for safety and health certification programs offered by industry-based safety programs and associations (IBSPs). These safety and health certification programs are offered to Manitoba employers to help reduce workplace injuries and illnesses and promote a culture of safety in Manitoba, in turn providing reductions and rebates in WCB premiums.

There are currently 4 IBSPs that are Certifying Partners (CPs) for the SAFE Work Certified program:

CPs are tasked with providing direct support and resources needed by employers to obtain safety and health certification. Currently, each CP employs or contracts auditors to conduct audits of companies seeking this certification. Based on the result of the audit, the CP would recommend employers for certification and SWMB grants the certification. As part of their process, SWMB may review the detailed audit for quality assurance purposes.

This training program is the result of a 2022 modernization initiative that replaced the outdated and error prone excel spreadsheet with AuditSoft, the industry leading electronic audit software solution.

A license is required for every audit that is started.

To obtain a license:

1. Click on Get new license.

2. Select your IBSP and the required SWC audit from the list.

3. Enter the name of the company to be audited.

4. Click Submit your license request to your IBSP.

5. You will be returned to the AuditSoft Home page and the requested license with the status, License pending approval, will be listed on the left side of the page.

6. To check if the license has been approved click the refresh button. Once approved the License pending approval status will be removed and you are ready to start your audit.

Once the AuditSoft License has been approved you can:

1. Click on the license name under the Start a new audit column.

1. This will open a new audit and the audit Instructions page will be displayed. Read the instructions.

2. Before you proceed click on the training link and complete the AuditSoft Application Overview online training.

Now that you have completed the AuditSoft Application Overview Online training and you have started a new audit we can proceed.

1. The workflow of every audit is to start at the instructions and to then follow the workflow systematically from top to bottom, completing each section in the left menu before moving to the next.

List the details of the company or organization that is being audited. Companies often merge or are acquired and AuditSoft does support changes in business structure:

1. You do have the ability to add multiple Workers Compensation Board (WCB) numbers.

2. And multiple Classification codes can be assigned to each WCB number.

An audit is a snapshot that represents the state of a company’s occupational health and safety program at a specific point in time. To ensure that the audit is completed in a timely matter to capture the snapshot, guidance is provided to the auditors on the amount of time that the audit should take:

To remind the auditor of this guidance:

1. There is a reminder clock in the upper left corner.

2. The available time on the clock is determined by the dates in the Audit Details section.

After the Audit Information section has been completed, with a green check mark next to each subsection, it is time to move to the next section of the audit.

There are five distinct sections to the audit:

Of these sections only one section can be excluded. Please refer to the Instructions menu item for more details. In the Instructions section it states that:

An important part of audit planning is to determine which sites to visit, how many interviews to do and the number of observation tours to complete.

1. In this section add each company site,

2. For each site, enter the number of employees of each role that work at the site.

3. Finally, we need to enter the number of employees that fall within a specific group (or attribute group) that will need to be asked additional questions during an the audit interviews, for example of the 14 employees at the Winnipeg site there are 4 employees that are part of the WSH committee.

5. Based on the number of employees entered, a recommended minimum number of interviews is calculated. This recommended number of interviews can be used in the Audit Plan that is submitted to the IBSP, or if you already have an approved Audit Plan with a different number of interviews the recommended number can be over written – see Interview Planning below.

Next determine which sites with be included in the audit. To be included means that you will perform at least one evidence gathering activity at the site. There are 3 evidence gathering methods:

D - Documentation review.

I - conducting employee Interviews.

O - completing and Observation tour.

6. Always include the head office in the audit. In most cases you will want to complete all 3 evidence gathering steps (DIO) at the head office.

7. For other sites you may or may not include a documentation review (more about this in the documentation review section), Interviews and observations based on your IBSPs recommendation and your audit plan.

The purpose here is to ensure that you select a representative sample. If you have a pre-approved Audit Plan you can enter the custom plan by:

1. Selecting the Use Custom Interview Plan option

2. Entering the approved number of interviews that need to be completed at each site.

3. And select the option to overrides the automatically calculated minimum number of required interviews with the approved number of interviews.

After the Scope section has been completed, with a green check mark next to each subsection, it is time to move to the next section of the audit.

When gathering evidence, it is standard audit practice to visit one site at a time. At each visited site:

With the use of technology and specifically online document repositories (Dropbox, SharePoint, etc.) and video conferencing tools (Zoom, Teams, etc.) some of the D and I tasks can be completed remotely.

When you start an audit, it is a best practice to start with a documentation review at the Head office. Depending on the documentation available at the Head office you may not have to review documentation at subsequent sites. During the documentation review there are generally two types of documents that are encountered:

To start the documentation review at the head office:

1. Select the head office name on the Review Documentation page.

2. All documentation review questions should be answered at the Head office.

3. The only questions that do not need to be answered are those optional questions that may not be applicable and that can be marked as not applicable to the audit.

At the start of the Review Documentation section the differences between directive and operational documents were discussed. If all the operational documents required for the audit were not available at the head office for review, it may be necessary to review only those operational documents that were not available as part of a documentation review at other site(s).

4. Start the documentation review at the next site.

5. At the site questions related to directive documents, that have already been reviewed at the head office, can be ignored and can either be:

6. Questions related to operational documents that are specific to the site, and that could not be reviewed at the head office, like site specific emergency response plans should be answered.

After confirming the existence of the required documentation, the next step is to verify how well the health and safety system is communicated to employees by determining if they were included in the development of the program and the confirm that they are aware of the existence of procedures and policies and that these are followed as prescribed.

It is an industry best practice to interview employees one-on-one in a private setting where they can speak openly. To start an interview:

1. Select the role of the person that you are interviewing at the site where they work.

2. Then select Start.

The Interview page will only list questions that are applicable to the role of the interviewee that was selected.

3. At the top of the page, based on the role, there may be one or more employee attributes that can be selected (these can include “Vulnerable worker”, “Workplace Safety and Health Committee Member” and/or “Contract worker”). Each of these attributes is associated with additional questions that are added to the questions list if the attribute is checked.

The final evidence gathering step is to complete a tour of the site(s) that were visited and to record observations. The goal is to get a sense of the overall level of compliance with the standards and company policies and procedures.

The gathering of evidence represents the bulk of work in any audit and after completion the Gather Evidence section will be marked with a green check mark next to each subsection. It is now time to move to the next section of the audit.

The audit result section is where we draft the final audit responses that will appear in the report. Any notes that we recorded during the Evidence Gathering steps can be accessed and referenced to formulate the final audit response.

1. Audit Results contains approximately 23 elements and sub-elements that address the different parts of the SafeWork Certificate (SWC) audit.

2. Return to the Select Content section to review the grouping of these elements and sub elements into the 5 major sections of the audit. They are:

Each element of the audit has several questions and when completing the questions, it is important to keep the content separate and to not duplicate content. In general, there are three (3) text areas per question for recording:

3. Findings and notes are required for all questions.

4. Strengths are optional.

5. Corrective actions/Opportunities for improvement: Corrective action is required if you do not achieve all the available points for a question, else you can optionally define an Opportunity for improvement.

There are some subtle differences between the 5 main audit sections ant they will be discussed briefly below:

This section includes elements: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N

The questions in this section determine the pass/fail percentages of the audit. Questions are automatically scored based on the responses that were defined in the Evidence gathering steps. There are a few scoring rules to be aware of:

Element N is different for each IBSP and depends on the audit license requested. Each audit will have only one of the following possible sections:

This section includes elements: A*, B*, C*, D*, F*, I* (all elements with an *)

This section, though having the name “Optional”, is required for certification audits, but the responses to the questions do not impact the pass/fail rating of the audit if all the applicable questions in this section are answered and all requirements are completed.

This section includes element: O

This section is required but the responses to the questions do not impact the pass/fail rating of the audit if all the questions in this section are answered and all requirements are completed.

Questions are manually scored by clicking on the drop-down list (1) of possible responses next to each question and selecting the appropriate response.

This section includes element: P

This section is required but the responses to the questions do not impact the pass/fail rating of the audit if all the questions in this section are answered and all requirements are completed.

There are only two questions in the section and both questions are automatically scored based on interview responses.

This section includes element: Q

This section is required but the responses to the questions do not impact the pass/fail rating of the audit if all the questions in this section are answered and all requirements are completed.

There is only one question in the section that must be manually scored by clicking on the drop-down list of possible responses next to the question and selecting the appropriate response.

After answering every question in the Audit Results section, it will be marked with a green check mark next to each element and sub element. It is now time to move to the next section of the audit.

The final section of the audit to complete is the (1) Summary information section. This section is an accumulation of supporting documents and attachments that must be provided as part of the audit submission. Each sub-section may include:

2. Guidelines outlining what is expected as a response.

3. An area for providing a written response and/or

4. The ability to attach a document.

After completing this section your audit has been completed and there should be a green check mark next to each element on the left menu of AuditSoft. It is now time to move to the final section to submit your audit for quality assurance review.

You are now ready to review your audit before submitting it:

1. The Save PDF report button in the toolbar will create a draft PDF for you to review.

When you have reviewed the draft and you are ready to submit it to your IBSP:

2. Select Submit from the left navigation menu.

3. Confirm that there are not any incomplete sections in your audit. If there are, click on the link(s) to add additional content and then return to this section.

4. Click Send to submit your audit to your IBSP for quality assurance (QA).

For question related to the content of the audit like:

Please reach out to your IBSP for clarification they can be reached at:

AuditSoft is a software company that implemented the questions set and guidelines as they were provided by Safe Work Manitoba (SWMB) and your IBSP. AuditSoft cannot change questions and/or wording independent of approval by your IBSP and SWMB.

If you have a question about how the AuditSoft software application works, there is an extensive online manual including many frequently asked questions (FAQ) responses that can be accessed at:

Or if require software support, please contact AuditSoft at: