The Health and Safety Audit Report as an essential document – a case study investigating Audit Reports in terms of their value in knowledge management and the implications for, and impacts on, delivering behavioural change in construction organisations

The Health and Safety (H&S) audit process is implemented on construction sites worldwide and Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) are used to streamline the process of gathering, capturing, transferring and sharing knowledge allowing organisations to drive behavioural change. But what happens to the findings of H&S audits and what value can be derived from them from the behavioural change perspective? This forms the research question investigated in this case study. Themes investigated were: the importance of H&S audits by regulatory authorities, KMS and their benefits to behavioural change in the organisation and finally, the main reasons for poor linkage of H&S audit outputs with the KMS. The research investigated the audit process and how effectively lessons learned are captured and transferred into the KMS in a construction company operating across multiple sites. This involved a mixed methods approach with completion of 20 on-line surveys and 10 individual semi-structured interviews. The data was analysed in line with information from a literature review and a number of recommendations emerged. It was important that these recommendations were realistic, implementable and cost efficient so they could bring value in terms of allowing the outputs from H&S audits assimilate into KMS thereby facilitating behavioural change in the organisation.