‍High-risk industries require a unique and proactive approach to managing safe behaviors and promoting a positive safety culture.

With the potential for severe consequences, organizations must take a proactive stance to ensure the safety and well-being of their workers. Organizations can create a safe and secure environment for their employees by implementing the following strategies.

Anticipating and Planning for At-Risk Work Conditions

 Proactive employers identify the at-risk behaviors and the conditions their workforce face so that mitigation strategies are developed. While every organization and industry will have different at-risk behaviors, a few are more common across industries. These include:

• Substance abuse. Substance abuse is an issue that many organizations must tackle, particularly those in industries with a higher risk of injuries, such as construction and manufacturing. Employers must ensure their employees are free from substances that could impair their judgment
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Here’s a common thing that contractors deal with every day. You’ve completed a prequalification questionnaire for a potential new client. Typically, you are answering a WORD form, maybe a formatted pdf, or more and more frequently, an online questionnaire ranging from 2 to 50 screens and hundreds of individual data fields. Of all this content, do you know what clients actually look at? If you suspect that they don’t look at all the data, you’d be right. Particularly with online platforms, lots of information is being requested, but little of it is consistently looked at.  

User analytics over nearly two decades show that three focus areas get more client attention than all the other categories combined. Roughly, 60% of client page views are in these three areas:

• Incidents, workplace injuries
• Workers Compensation performance, and
• Regulatory compliance

Let’s unpack each of these.

First, what’s meant by incident experience. Here we’re talking specifically about incident frequenc...

The front-line supervisor has as much influence on worker behavior as any manager or executive. While not as simple as observing worker behaviors, the inputs of front-line leaders to health and safety are measurable. It's been said that what gets measured gets managed and this checklist may be helpful to your organization.

Download the accompanying PDF here >>

Assessing the quality of efforts and providing coaching are practices that increase compliance, improve culture and build resiliency in an organization.

Our Supervisor HSE Leadership checklist contains eleven measurable activities that are typically the responsibility of a front-line leader. Each checklist item is tied to a legislative requirement or a common industry practice. These items help establish a measurable base for supervisor leadership in the critical areas of risk assessment, and health and safety communications.

Our Contractor Management Basics checklist package has 10 checklists with more than 130 complia...

As a global trend, more organizations are outsourcing work. This means contractor management is increasing in importance, and prequalification is a vital part of the process.

Download the accompanying PDF here >>

By prequalification, we mean the preliminary stage of the contractor management cycle, where the goal is to determine whether a contractor has the capacity and capability required to complete the job successfully. We'll examine this critical business activity's benefits and risks.

THE KEY BENEFITS OF PREQUALIFYING CONTRACTORS 

Prequalification of contractors is an essential step in the contractor management process. And a well-designed prequalification system will achieve four main goals: 

1. Conserve your time
2. Conserve your financial resources
3. Reduce risk by using vetted and reliable contractors
4. Improve communication and improve your contractor relationships

There are many compelling reasons how prequalification brings value to clients:

It Mitigates Risk

Cli...

Welcome to Contractor Prequalification Best Practices.

Download the accompanying PDF here >>

As a global trend, more organizations are outsourcing work. This means contractor management is increasing in importance, and prequalification is a vital part of the process.

By prequalification, we mean the preliminary stage of the contractor management cycle that determines if a service provider has the resources and competence to complete the job successfully. Ahead we'll examine some best practices related to this critical business activity.

You can employ many best practices to mitigate the risks and improve operations when working with contractors. Remember, though, that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The following methods are tried and true, but consideration of how any one of them may fit your operations is essential to assess.

Put a Contractor Management Standard In Place

Establishing a written company Standard that documents your contractor management proces...

The Issue:

Sustainability is vital to the long-term success of your contractor management process, especially the prequalification step.

Creating a business system involves writing down principles and practices that deliver value to an organization and its customers. Business systems are implemented for various reasons contributing to an organization's success. And it's a fundamental success factor to implement what can be sustained over the long haul. Here are three key reasons to implement a contractor prequalification business system:

• Consistency of outcomes: There is long-term value in systems that produce reliable results. For example, your business processes work better when each department knows what they are responsible for and what the quality requirements are.
• Meeting client requirements: When a defined approach is used, the organization will tend to assess, measure, and anticipate the outcomes of what their clients want and don't want.
• Reducing costs and improving
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  https://www.cqntraining.com/emergency-action-plans-checklist

High-hazard work sites require emergency action plans consistent with the risks currently present, and likely to be created, at the worksite. The plan contains procedures and specifies resources for scenarios that may arise on the site.

These are emergency situations that can occur on high-risk worksites:

• Major injuries to workers, visitors or the public
• Spills or release of chemicals
• Fire and explosion
• Structural failure
• Incidents involving vehicles and moving equipment
• Crane and lifting equipment failure
• Trench and excavation collapse
• Extreme weather conditions and natural disasters such as tornados, floods, or extremes of hot or cold temperatures
• Bomb threats and active shooter events

The Emergency Action Plans Focused Observation assesses the project-level planning requirements, resources, and quality of site communications. These elements are necessary to establish an effective site emergency plan.

The issue:

Knowing Contractor Insurance Status is Critical Risk Management

Your organization is at risk if your contractor is involved in an incident and has inadequate insurance. It's worse, obviously, if they have no policy at all.

Common incidents are property damage, vehicle crashes, material or equipment losses due to theft or vandalism, or, increasingly likely, due to extreme weather or a cyber security event.

Losses and claims involving uninsured contractors are an everyday thing. Your insurance agent can likely give you multiple examples from your industry and region.

Many purchasers don't know contractor insurance status in real-time. Meaning unquantified risk is unmanaged risk. The primary exposure here is financial liability.   

Obviously, litigation or an action by an involved third party further drives up costs and sometimes reputational damage.

The good news is that the effort, knowledge, and cost to control these exposures are relatively moderate but take some res...

Four Key Success Factors

As a global trend, more organizations in nearly all sectors of the economy are outsourcing more work. Currently, contractors fill one in every five jobs in the United States. Contractors are projected to make up half the workforce within the next decade. This trend is common across industrialized and emerging countries around the world.

No matter the industry, a key factor is workplace health and safety. The following is an introduction to the main elements of contractor management with an occupational health and safety focus.

Contractor management is a business process implemented by purchasing organizations to maximize efficiency and reduce sources of loss with their contracted services. This article will focus on common systems and activities in high-risk workplaces.

High-risk workplaces are physical locations and work activities that expose workers to significant or unusual hazards. Examples include:

• operating machinery,
• work on or near high-pressur
...

Contractor Management Leadership: Your Process Owner

Do you have a person who owns your contractor management process? Nearly every organization has subject matter experts in various roles necessary to make the company run. Think about your payroll, maintenance, cyber security, or new hire onboarding. All of these functions likely have an official or unofficial process owner. Yet, many companies don't have an in-house expert to guide their contractor management.

In most high-risk industries, contractors play a pivotal role in the success of owners and prime contractors. An effective contractor management process is essential that contractors are well-managed. This article explores the role of the Contractor Management Process Owner (CMPO) and how to identify and support one.

What is a Contractor Management Process Owner?

First, let's define a process. A process is a structured and repeatable series of steps that achieve a business outcome.

Therefore, a process owner manages a proc...