‍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...

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...

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...

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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Do You Have a Quarterback for Your Contractor Management Process?

Contractors play a pivotal role in the success of owners and prime contractors in high-risk industries. And an effective management process is essential to ensure that contractors are well-coordinated. This article explores the role of the Contractor Management Process Owner (CMPO) and how to identify and support one. Read on!

What is a Contractor Management Process Owner?

First, let's define 'process.' A process is a structured and repeatable series of steps that accomplish a defined business objective — for example, contractor management has seven steps spread across three phases.

Therefore, a process owner is accountable for designing a system, using the right combination of people, technical knowledge, and organizational support to effectively run the process.

A Contractor Management Process Owner (CMPO) is a person who is responsible for the oversight, development, and implementation of a contractor management ...

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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