Improving Contractor Safety Management

Contractor safety management is essential for any organization aiming to fulfill environmental, health, and safety (EHS) goals. Implementing a robust contractor safety program will help your company protect its workers, meet regulatory compliance, save time and money, and decrease liability. In this comprehensive blog, we’ll explain the importance of contractor safety compliance and provide resources for implementing it in your own workplace.

What is Contractor Safety Management?

Contractor safety management refers to the strategies, processes, and systems a company uses to oversee the safety of contractors working on its premises or projects. This process involves:

• Evaluating potential risks
• Enforcing safety standards
• Conducting regular training
• Ensuring that contractors comply with regulations

Effective contractor safety management helps maintain a safe work environment for everyone involved and minimizes risks associated with outside workers. By actively managing safety expectations and fostering clear communication, companies can create a culture of safety that extends to all contractors.

Why is Contractor Safety Management Important?

The construction industry has consistently faced shortages in skilled labor over the past several years. As employers rely on contractors to fill positions, assessing contractor safety has become essential.

Contractors can face financial pressures and impending deadlines, which can lead to cutting corners or engaging in unsafe behaviors. In addition, contract workers may be undertrained and underqualified. A lack of communication and coordination means that they never acquire the needed skills or safety knowledge for the job. For example, 95% of contractors surveyed in the USCC/USG Commercial Construction Index for Q1 2019 expressed concerns over whether their employees had adequate skill levels.

Additionally, contractors are often exposed to various types of risks and hazards. It’s critical that organizations implement effective contractor safety management to reduce potential injuries, fatalities, and incidents.

Benefits of implementing an effective contractor safety program include:

• Protection of contractors and core workforce
• Avoiding potential liabilities, regulatory fines, and reputational damage
• Enhanced operational efficiency due to fewer incidents, delays, and repairs
• Improved workplace productivity

Is a Contractor Safety Plan Required by OSHA?

A contractor safety plan is required by OSHA in many circumstances. Under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations, employers are responsible for maintaining a safe work environment.

OSHA holds both host employers, or those hiring contractors, and contractors accountable for ensuring safe practices on the job site. This includes implementing effective safety management systems, which should include a contractor safety plan.

Who is Responsible for Site Safety?

OSHA’s multi-employer worksite policy clarifies that all employers, including those overseeing contractors, can be held liable for violations impacting worker safety. Therefore, if a contractor’s work poses potential risks to employees on a shared job site, the host employer must ensure that appropriate safety protocols are in place.

In addition, OSHA also clearly indicates that subcontractors are also subject to safety and health regulations, stating that “With respect to subcontracted work, the prime contractor and any subcontractor or subcontractors shall be deemed to have joint responsibility.”

How to Implement a Contractor Safety Management Program

Implementing a robust contractor safety management program is essential to upholding EHS practices in your workplace. In the following section, we’ll break down this process and provide resources for your own organization.

Step 1: Set Contractor Safety Specifications and Pre-Job Qualifications

It’s important that employers establish safety rules and clearly communicate expectations by incorporating safety specifications into bid documents.

First, make sure roles and responsibilities are clearly defined between all employers and their contractors. Don’t put anything into the contract terms that you wouldn’t actually be willing to enforce.

Once you’ve received bids, determine what criteria you should use to vet prospective contractors.

The best solution is to develop a standardized pre-job safety qualification process. Here are some options for moving forward:

1. Examine key performance indicators (KPI’s). These KPIs can include a contractor’s TRIR and DART rates over the past five years, which can be calculated to serve as helpful benchmarks. TCIR and DART rates can also be compared to those of other companies in a contractor’s applicable NAICS code, so you can see how they measure up to their competition.
2. Review contractors’ information. This may include a contractor’s previous worker compensation claims, injury logs, training records, equipment calibration records, and environmental reports.

While these metrics will provide you with a good start, they might not tell the whole story. Visit OSHA’s website to check if a contractor has had any OSHA citations in the past.

Step 2: Provide Consistent Training to Contractors

Before contractors begin work, employers should ensure that all workers receive consistent safety training. Make sure to implement standardized online-based training with subsequent competency assessments.

Additional steps include:

• Holding safety orientation meetings. These meetings should be held to introduce contractors to your safety goals and requirements.
• Ensure that new hires understand how they fit into your company. This applies even if your new hires are only temporary workers.
• Ensure that new hires are aware of what personal protective equipment (PPE) they should use. for their tasks and understand how to report hazards, incidents, and near misses.

As with your own employees, you’ll want to keep track of which safety training your contractors have received and when they were last trained. This can be difficult to track manually, especially for temporary contractors. In such cases, you may want to turn to safety training tracking software to assist you.

Step 3: Monitor and Evaluate Performance

Once work begins, employers should conduct periodic safety assessments to make sure the established safety rules are being followed.

This can easily be accomplished through:

• Routine workplace inspections
• Walk-throughs of work sites
• Behavior based safety (BBS) programs

BBS programs allow key members to observe the safety behaviors of workers.

The data collected through these procedures should help you make strategic choices about what components you should continue, start, or stop. This will help improve your contractor safety management program overall.

How Can Safety Management Software Help?

While it’s best to use data to drive decisions, tracking and reporting on large amounts of safety data can be time-consuming. Implementing safety management software helps companies easily ensure that each party involved in a project is committed to safety.

In the following section, we’ll cover some key benefits of utilizing Vector’s safety management software to enhance contractor safety.

1. Accessible Data in a Central Location

The more data available to you, the more accurate your analysis and decision-making will be. However, more data also means more time spent managing and tracking specific records.

By storing your data in a centralized database, the task of managing and tracking records will become much easier. With safety management software:

• Multiple users will be able to enter data at once. This tremendously reduces the amount of time it takes to update records.
• You’ll find ways to easily filter your data. This will make it easier to search for specific records without impacting other users.

Having all your data in one accessible location saves invaluable time, and it also makes data analysis much easier.

2. Easy Contractor Evaluation

Data can show what’s working in your organization and what needs improvement, but first, your data must be in an easy-to-evaluate format.

Safety management software will help with this process by allowing you to:

1. Turn safety inspections, records, and training into benchmarks for evaluating safety performance.
2. Break down these benchmarks for easy comparison across job sites, contractor companies, or departments.
3. Create reports that allow for quick and simple evaluation of contractors, allowing you to adjust before it’s too late.
4. Have reports updated in real-time as new data is entered into the system.

From determining pre-qualifications to evaluating performance, contractor safety management begins and ends with safety data. Software makes managing and acting upon that data more efficient, which in turn allows for better contractor safety management.

How Vector Solutions’ LMS Helps with Contractor Safety Management

At Vector Solutions, we also offer a comprehensive learning management system (LMS) to help organizations elevate their contractor safety management. Our LMS delivers:

• Centralized training and compliance tracking. This allows companies to consolidate all contractor training records in one place, making it easy to track who has completed required courses, certifications, and safety briefings.
• Customizable safety training. Our LMS offers a range of industry-specific training courses that can be customized to meet the unique safety requirements of your company.
• Real-time reporting and analytics. Our LMS provides powerful reporting and analytics tools to help companies monitor contractor performance in real-time.
• Mobile accessibility for field training. Recognizing that many contractors work in the field, our LMS is accessible on mobile devices, allowing contractors to complete training anytime, anywhere.
• Automated compliance management. Our LMS automates the process of tracking and managing compliance with OSHA standards, industry regulations, and company-specific safety policies.

Take your contractor safety program to the next level with the combined power of our LMS and EHS software. Request a demo and learn more.