A Guide to Maintaining Contractor Health and Safety after COVID-19

COVID makes managing contractor safety even harder

In the decade before the outbreak of COVID, the ranks of contractors increased by leaps and bounds. Forecasts showed that the contractor labor force would swell to half of the entire U.S. workforceⁱ.

In Australia, the numbers weren’t too far behind. The contractor labor force there boomed to more than a million workersⁱⁱ.

For host companies, the advantages were clear: lower internal labor costs, increased flexibility, and less need for direct management oversight.

However, regulation dictated that third-party workers were due the same safety protections as their full-time counterparts.

That duty of care obligation became all the more difficult to maintain as the pandemic broke out.

Contractors, clustered heavily in people-centric industries, were at high risk of virus transmission.

Host companies and other stakeholders, in their turn, finally woke up to the fact that regulation placed them on the hook for civil and criminal sanction if they couldn’t take reasonable care to maintain the health and safety of contractors and subcontractors. 

Add to that, the pandemic (and flurry of regulation that attended it) introduced even more administrative friction into the contractor safety management ecosystem.

And that’s the state of play today. Safety rules affecting employees, contractors, and subcontractors change on the dime. Meanwhile, the virus itself charts an unpredictable path.

In addition to confusion over the latest COVID safety protocols, the ecosystem faces other stark challenges, such as guaranteeing the safety of personnel moving between multiple sites, maintaining visibility over on-site personnel, and increasing confusion over supplier go-live status.

The Great Resignation and supply-chain issues ravaging Safety teams and their resources add another wrinkle. Companies now find themselves lacking the right people, tools, and information to effectively manage their growing contractor workforce. As a result, these entities risk losing face, money, and productivity, as well as eroding their core safety culture and falling out of regulatory compliance.

What can be done to operate safely in the new normal of COVID? The subsequent guide lays out the strategies and digital solutions stakeholders in the contractor ecosystem can deploy to keep contractors safe and productive.

Accounting for pre-existing challenges to contractor safety management

Unfortunately, COVID only served to exacerbated existing contractor safety management challenges: for instance, the lack of a cohesive contract(or) management process.

Even before the pandemic, too many companies made contracting decisions quickly and haphazardly, driven by short-term need not long-term strategy.

The contractor management process itself was rarely standardized; various business units owned different pieces of the process with little cross-functional collaboration.

The lack of alignment, routinization, and long-term planning led inevitably to longer, less efficient contracting processes. Safety and productivity went by the wayside; risk and cost went up. 

Addressing these systemic challenges means acknowledging the lack of investment that went into developing coherent contracting strategies. Businesses relied too heavily on past practices, and individual business units didn’t perform detailed evaluations of prior contractors.

Instead, contracts were simply closed out after tasks were completed – not with an eye towards critical project evaluation and continuously improving the contractor process itself.

Meanwhile, when available, the safety management technology to support contractor selection, relationship management, and evaluation wasn’t integrated across all relevant business functions. 

Many of the same challenges remain in this post-COVID era, along with others such as:

• Time pressure. Contract work is often deadline oriented, meaning that contractors have a financial incentive to cut corners or engage in unsafe behavior.
• Poor training. While many jurisdictions mandate training as part of a worker’s induction, the quality of that training can vary widely.
  
  Poor training, minimal involvement in safety initiatives, and low supervision can all imperil contract employees, who may have barely acquired the necessary skills or safety knowledge to pursue the job at hand.
• Failure to communicate. Contract workers often receive incomplete briefing documents, vague instructions, and unclear expectations from the host business. Not only is this communication failure unsafe for contractors, but it also introduces task creep and cost overruns for the host business.
  
  Additionally, companies don’t always have a specific course of action laid out in the case of contractor infractions like they do with internal staff.
  
  Contractor safety infractions are handled in an ad hoc fashion, which corrodes confidence in the business’s core safety culture. 
• Lax enforcement. Across industry, contractor safety performance tends to lag behind that of host organizations. And that performance lag reflects poorly on host organizations, as well. These companies compromise their own internal safety culture when they relax enforcement of safety standards for their contractor labor forceⁱⁱⁱ. 

Best safety practices throughout the contractor life cycle

Correcting for these contractor safety management challenges, with so many moving parts, people, and risks exacerbated by COVID, is far from simple. Indeed, it will take adopting an ongoing lifecycle process to help manage the safety of contractors and subcontractors working on your sites or under your care.

Fortunately, best-practice measures to address these contractor safety management challenges remain the same as they’ve always been – now, of course, companies must keep abreast of changing COVID safety regulations, as well.

The best-practice lifecycle management processes in question begin at the contractor procurement stage. That’s when businesses engage contractors to perform work on
their sites.

Here, work health and safety regulations are likely to have already imposed legal obligations on host companies to consult, cooperate, and coordinate activities with contracted entities before contractors begin their work.

Host companies should, of course, heed these safety obligations to stay in compliance. 

Obligations notwithstanding, though, integrating safety consultation, cooperation, and coordination into the contractor procurement process provides benefits of its own, such as increased sharing of knowledge between important stakeholders, which can lead to higher levels of safety and lower levels of risk. 

A best-practice contractor safety consultation does the following:

• Provides relevant information
• Gives a reasonable opportunity for all parties to express their views, raise WHS issues, and contribute to the decision-making process
• Lays out different hazards and risks to health and safety, including
  – Management of asbestos and asbestos removal
  – Major hazard facilities
  – Hazardous manual tasks
  – Confined spaces
  – Falls
  – High risk work
  – Hazardous chemical, including lead

Nor does contractor lifecycle management end with procurement.

Effective contractor lifecycle management requires proactive management of contractors and subcontractors from pre-qualification to post-job evaluation. Effective management can lead to significant improvements in cost savings, efficiency, and compliance – not to mention contractor safety.

To that end, here are some best practices in contractor lifecycle management: 

1. Pre-qualification. During this stage, many companies, especially those that engage numerous contractors, rely on third-party prequalifying companies to handle initial contractor vetting. In turn, those third-party vendors make vetting decisions largely based on factors, like contractor safety history and cost projections. 

Whether undertaken by the host company or a vendor, this initial vetting should go beyond quantifiable data. A numbers-only vetting approach provides limited understanding of future need.

Instead, companies should try to involve more stakeholders to get a broader, cross-functional look at pricing, use, and process-related costs. Getting a clear picture of the engagement during pre-qualification can also help improve efficiencies and productivity down the road.

Host companies should also manage all contractor data in a dedicated, centralized database. There, it can be easily shared and updated, after the engagement begins in earnest.

2. Pre-job task and risk assessment. A contractor’s risk rating is the category of risk contracted work falls under. It’s essential to accurately calculate a contractor’s risk rating, which will put contractors in a predetermined risk category

However, it’s not enough to perform an initial risk assessment based on an overly broad scope of work. Host companies need to make subsequent assessments, accounting for a contractor’s detailed work procedure.

To this end, companies will need to use a dynamic risk matrix to allocate points based on project risk factors, e.g., as severity, frequency, incident probability, cost, schedule, security, etc.

3. Contractor training and orientation. Most jurisdictions mandate that host companies perform on-site safety inductions and skills training for labor hires before those workers are able to work on a site. To be beneficial, those trainings have to be specific to the site(s) where contract work will take place. 

Why does it matter? Projects that receive higher risk ratings should get more safety attention, e.g., more frequent hazardous job meetings and walkthroughs.

4. Monitoring the job. Effective contractor monitoring consists of job assessments undertaken during the contract term. Depending on a project’s risk rating, assessment can run the gamut – from daily check-ins to weekly walkthroughs, even too monthly or yearly assessments. 

Irrespective of the project’s risk rating, though, host companies should be regularly receiving safety observations and up-to-date incident logs from their contractor workforce.

Companies should also be undertaking routine performance reviews and field verifications.

The resultant findings should then be centralized in an easily accessible database, preferably end-to-end safety management software with contractor relationship management capabilities to track safety observations, report on contractor non-compliance, communicate unsafe conditions, and measure time to closure. 

5. Post-job evaluation. Many companies don’t have rigorous standards for evaluating contractor work after the engagement has been completed. The result: subpar contractors often get rehired with little contractor requalification oversight. 

To avoid this, companies should perform post-job work assessments, with particular emphasis placed on safety compliance, customer service, and, of course, the quality of the finished project.

Companies should also be upfront with contractors about these post-work evaluative measures during the procurement process. 

Digital technology to address COVID safety risk to contractor sand compliance risk to hosts

What about COVID-related risks? Indeed, COVID-19 and associated worker shortages and supply-chain disruptions have further complicated the global contractor relationship, forcing all parties involved in that ecosystem, including hosts, contractors, and subcontractors, to implement safety modifications – sometimes overnight.

With so much happening, companies that prioritize best-practice methods might not even get it right. Which is why those companies must implement industry best practices with the help of enhanced contractor safety management solutions.

What do such solutions do?

Well, these enhanced contractor management capabilities enable organizations to better manage the end-to-end contractor lifecycle, from pre-qualification and onboarding through to performance management and contract closure, based on an organization’s unique requirements.

What’s more, the enhanced contractor management capabilities further support organizations in managing their contractor workforce, mitigating safety, security, and organizational risk, while improving efficiency.

How, exactly?

Reducing the administrative load of contractor management, these solutions empower contractors to serve themselves, by using end-to-end safety management software to participate in Safety initiatives. Here, contractor self-registration functionality enables contractors to maintain their own company details online, including insurances, inductions, and competencies, simply by clicking a link in an invitation email or scanning a QR code.

Security teams, in their turn, also benefit from the enhanced functionality – empowered with the ability to verify contractors permitted on site more quickly.

A full list of relevant functionality for addressing contractor risk in the era of COVID-19 includes:

• Streamline the onboarding of entities, workers, as well as plans and equipment
• Share the compliance workload with contractor managers and workers
• Centralize the storage of contractor information in the cloud
• Implement scored pre-qualification processes to ensure contractors meet organizational requirements
• Request documents from entities to track insurances, certificates, licenses, registrations, and plans
• Manage a contractor plan through the upload of plan details, documents, and questionnaires 
• Monitor worker compliance by enabling assignment of inductions and competencies for upload
• Automate follow ups through configurable workflows to support contractors to remain compliant
• Capture case notes and actions assigned to contractor workers
• Record details of contractor engagements as part of contractor performance management
• Improve compliance onsite through access control checks
• Search contractor entities based on their service offerings and location
• Broadcast notifications to contractors using templated messages via SMS and voice
• Visualize the status of contractors using real-time analytics
• Generate configurable reports and distribute to personnel

Finally, contractor management was a challenge before COVID. But now, the pandemic has ratcheted up administrative burdens put on companies to keep their contractor workforces safe, secure, and in compliance with oft-changing rules and requirements.

Fortunately, these companies have options. In addition to best-practice contractor life cycle maintenance, companies can procure technology solutions with enhanced contractor-management capabilities, such as the Noggin Work Safety Module

These solutions have been built with an eye towards reducing administrative load. Specifically, enhanced functionality, such as contractor self-registration, have been designed to promote self-management.

What’s the upshot? You save time and money and lower risk by managing the entire contractor lifecycle from registration, insurance, and competency uploads through to induction, work-order allocation, and deactivation based on your unique organization requirements.

Sources

i. NPR/Marist Poll Results January 2018: Picture of Work. Available at http://maristpoll.marist.edu/nprmarist-poll-results-january-2018-picture-of-work.

ii. Australian Bureau of Statistics: Characteristics of Employment, Australia, August 2017. Available at http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/6333.0.

iii. Joy Inouye, Campbell Institute: Best Practices in Contractor Management. Available at http://www.thecampbellinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Campbell-Institute Best-Practices-in-Contractor-Management-WP.pdf