Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs) in high-risk industries are frequently under-resourced and find staying current with client initiatives a significant challenge. This is true in the evolving area of psychological safety. This article covers the fundamentals of psychological safety in the workplace and offers some starting points for SMBs to consider in 2023.

Psychological safety in the workplace refers to an environment in which employees feel safe and supported to express themselves and their ideas without fear or negative consequences. This includes feeling comfortable raising concerns or making mistakes and feeling welcomed and valued as a team member.

Creating a psychologically safe workplace can have numerous benefits, including:

• Improved work culture through increased creativity and innovation.
• Better communication and collaboration comes through respecting individuals and their points of view. Connection in as many directions as practical for each employee is the o
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This is a condensed version of our recent webinar on Kick-Off Meeting Best Practices. In this video, we discuss how organizations can benefit from kick-off meetings. Content includes:

• Activity description
• Intent and goals
• Stakeholders and work teams
• Sustainability for small organizations
• When to hold 
• Who leads the meeting
• Best practices

  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.

Contractor Assessment using Leading Indicators

 https://www.cqntraining.com/focus-observation-best-practices

Monitoring of work in progress occurs in a contract's active phase, where actions are taken to verify that contractors have implemented the worksite's safety standards.

While many monitoring activities can be used on complex, multi-employer worksites, Focused Observations can be uniquely valuable. Focused Observation is a contractor management best practice and a leading indicator of safety management. By concentrating effort on high-risk and critical safety program activities, focused observations give prime and general contractors actionable data. Once in hand, the data will guide adjustments in compliance management, training, and coaching up the project safety culture. The three areas of a worksite's operations where Focused Observation brings the most value are:

• tasks with high pre-identified risk, things like confined space entry and work at heights,
• tasks with prev
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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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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...

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...

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...

Mobilization is the series of actions required to bring a contractors’ people, equipment, and materials to the worksite. And doing it well is a high-value contractor management activity. Well-managed mobilization is critical for both contractors and clients as it generally determines how quickly and how well the contractor will meet project goals. Committing these critical steps to a measurable standard is also a project management best practice.

Download the accompanying PDF here >>

The degree that mobilization is well-planned and communicated is the difference between a contractor struggles to meet requirements versus a contractor that knows on day one how to execute and to what standards. Our Contractor HSE Mobilization checklist can be used to set requirements and provide a compliance framework for proactive management of contractor mobilization. It includes 15 critical activities that ensure clarity of communication and execution of worksite HSE requirements. Key content i...