Podcast - Working with Contractor Teams

[00:00:00] The use of contractors on our work sites is very prevalent at a lot of organizations. And these people, they don't work for your company and they aren't fully trained in your methods. And this can open up a lot of challenges when you are working towards building a world-class safety program. So let's talk about influencing safe work practices when it comes to contractor workforces.

Let's get to it.

[00:01:00] Hello? Hello, hello, my safety friends. Welcome back to a new episode of the Safety Geek Podcast. First and foremost, I just wanna thank you. I wanna thank you for sticking around for listening to the podcast. If you are getting a lot out of this podcast, please take a moment and leave a review on whatever podcasting app that you are listening to this on.

It really does help other people find the show, and I [00:02:00] do know that we have thousands of people who listen to the show and I'm just so grateful to all of you. So if you could just take a moment and leave a review, I would truly appreciate it. Today, what I wanna talk about is something that has come up several times in Safety Management Academy, and that is dealing with contractors.

Now, I'm not talking about a contractor safety program. I actually have an episode on that and I'll link to it in the show notes. But instead, what I'm talking about is when your company utilizes a lot of contractors and then you are put in charge of monitoring them and ensuring that they comply with your company policies and procedures.

So, let's dive into this little bit complicated topic and how you should be handling it.

[00:03:00] First and foremost, let's set this up. We are not talking about contractors. Who your company supervises, you know, like temp workers or hiring agencies, and we're not talking about the simple contractors who come on site for minor repairs, and then they're done in like a day or a week.

What I'm talking about is those situations where you work with long-term contractors who then have a team of employees that come onto your company site or your company's workplace or project. So think about like maintenance workers. In the distribution, we would have loaders and unloaders. Think about construction that is happening on your property and a construction company is now coming in and building something on your, within your facility or construction in general, right?

Whether you are [00:04:00] constructing residential property or business properties and you're using contractors from like multiple areas like electrical contractors, plumbing contractors, roofing contractors, right? And they're all coming onto your site to complete the project. That is what we're talking about.

Now, you should already have a contractor safety program that is vetting them and making sure that they're decent contractors that you know, they already have a safety program in place, they already have a decent safety record and you have a contract. You being your company has a contract with that contractor and agreements and all of that.

So you should already have that in place and I encourage you to check out that contractor safety program episode for more information on that. But now they are working right Now these people, like all that was in place and now they've come on site and they're working and their work practices are maybe not up to your [00:05:00] standards.

So why is this a problem? Like you have an agreement in place, there's no liability to the company if. They get injured. Why is it a big deal if your contractors are not following safe work practices? So, first off, it does open up some liability. If somebody was seriously injured, regardless of whether it was your fault or not, your company can still be named in the lawsuit and it could still cost that company money.

I actually had a truck driver, a delivery driver, hit a light pole pulling onto my property. He downed the wire and he got out of his truck and was electrocuted and died. We had nothing to do with this. The light pole was outside of our fence.

He hid it coming in. But because the fatality happened on our property, we were still named in the lawsuit and it still cost us a couple million dollars. So there's always liability there. Next, there's always the chance that the contractor could cause [00:06:00] damage to your company property or even injury to your company employees.

There's also the opportunity that they can go over budget if they're not working safely, or that they might miss deadlines if they're not working safely. They could also put out a negative public perception, depending upon your business. If you're building an apartment complex in the middle of downtown and the workers are just crap and they're not working safely and they're causing damage and causing hassles, how would that look to that apartment complex?

When it's time to rent, there's some public perception in that they might expect that the rents would be cheaper or they might not even consider, you know, going into that business. There's also, if your contractors are working within your facility, there's also the issue of your own employee's morale.

You know that the contractors might be doing things that your employees would never get away with. [00:07:00] So why are you allowing the contractors to get away with it? Or we can't do it that way. Why can't we? They're getting away with it and they're being safe, so why can't we do that? So it creates some animosity.

So that's why having contractors on site that aren't following your safe work practices is an issue. Now, I do wanna caution you 'cause you can't just like jump in and correct them. Like, I can't go in and correct a contractor employee who is not following the safe work practices, because the moment I do, I am now supervising that employee and in OSHA's eyes and in liability's eyes, I am now a supervisor of that employee.

And if they were to get injured, I'm now liable for it. So you don't wanna step out of bounds because you could be opening up a can of worms for yourself in the future, but you don't wanna tiptoe around it either, and you don't wanna ignore it. Now typically what ends up happening is when a contractor starts, the project safety would likely put their [00:08:00] employees through a condensed training.

And if you're not doing that, then you definitely should. You know, it's really getting them familiar with your policies, procedures, and expectations, and then any observations that you see of them not doing things correctly, you then pass on to that contractor's supervisor to handle. And if that contractor's supervisor doesn't handle it, then you have your project agreement or the project contract to back you up and your company contact whoever is in charge of the project for your company.

You know, it could be your maintenance, could be operations something like that. They would then step in and initiate that agreement, you know, on your company's behalf. Like you were told that you had to follow our safe work practices. Your employees are not, there's this penalty within our agreement if you're not doing it.

So you have to pay us this penalty or we can fire you, or whatever it happens to be. This is [00:09:00] where it gets tricky because your company person might not see the safety issue the same as you do, and they might decide not to do anything. They might decide it's not a big deal, right? Or their supervisor, the contractor supervisor just doesn't comply.

You're passing on the information, the company rep is telling them to do it, and they're just not complying and there's no consequences, right? There's no accountability and excuses start to fly around and then nothing changes. This is the frustration in the normal practice with contractors. So I wanna talk about what you can do instead.

So. If you find yourself in this situation, like what would a safety influencer do if you were in this situation and what steps can you take to influence them to do it right, without it even escalating to like enforcing your agreement, right? So first and foremost, you need to work on safety culture of your own team.

So to do that so first and foremost, you need to work on the safety culture of your own team. You need to make sure that your own team's safety culture is [00:10:00] where it needs to be. So that way when something happens, they've got your back, right? They see things the same way you do, they're gonna enforce it.

You don't want your own company representative to say, no, it's not a big deal, and nothing gets done. So if you see that happening, that's your major problem area. You need to fix the safety culture of your own team. And that's easy to do when you apply the systems and processes that we teach inside of Safety Management Academy.

So check that out. If you're already a member, make sure you're applying those processes the way that I've taught them. All right? Number two, you wanna set yourself up for success from the very beginning. So, like I said, you should be doing a condensed safety training with the contractor employees and making sure that they're familiar with your safety policies and procedures.

But when you do this training, you want to make sure that you are sending the message that you are not an enforcer, that you are there to help them reach their goals. [00:11:00] That it is the overarching belief of your organization, that when things are done safely, the project stays on time within budget, and everybody gets to go home at the end of the day with all of their fingers and toes.

And that is your job. That you're not here to enforce anything. You are here to help that contractor reach their goals. And you want to demonstrate the value that Safe Practices provides them not provides their company, provides the employees. Remember, this is a training with the employees.

So what is the value of them to wear their fall protection, to wear their PPE, to follow, you know, the JHAs, whatever it is you have set up, what is the value to them personally? And then you want to set the expectation of collaboration, not that you're the enforcer, the expectation is [00:12:00] that you as a contractor, employee need to collaborate with the safety team.

So that way we make a better work environment for everybody. So you want to tell them to always speak up if they know a better way to do things. If the JHA is making their job difficult and there's a better way to do it, they need to speak up and tell you. So that way you can make adjustments as needed.

You need to ask them how they would do the job and still keep the risk of injury, accident damage, liability, low, right? Ask them, this is how we collaborate. We don't tell people, we ask them and we take their inputs seriously. Next, you also need to have a near miss reporting system and incentivize your contractor employees to report near misses.

I think this is one of the most helpful things that you can do [00:13:00] because as they report near misses, you can then make adjustments to your procedures to protect them and refine them, right, and make them even better. But this is how you're engaging them in safety. And it could be like they go into a raffle and get a gift card or something like that, but every near misreported, you need to incentivize it in some way.

And this does not cross the line. This is like the near miss is this is an accident that could have happened that didn't. And then make sure in your near miss reporting, you ask them how they would've prevented it. So that helps you refine your policies and procedures. So this setting yourself up for success in the very beginning in this training session is you are setting that expectation of collaboration, but you're really setting the tone that you expect them to work safely and that you're a partner, that you're not an adversary.

A lot of times these contractor employees, they come into the workplace and they expect [00:14:00] that safety person to be like a tough guy, right? And here you're setting the expectations of, no, I'm your partner and I'm gonna take everything that you're giving me and we're going to refine this and make this good.

Because remember, these people are gonna be here for a long term. They might be there for a year or two years or something like that, right? Or maybe they're here for one project, but then you're gonna use them again and again and again in multiple projects depending on what your company does, right? The next thing that you need to do is set the expectation that you are not the decision maker.

So in Safety Management Academy, I always teach that safety needs to take a step back from decision making. And we use what we call an executive advisory committee to make all the decisions that are related to safety. So with contractors, you could do the same exact thing. Your executive advisory committee would not be made up of executives, but it would be made up of you and whoever the company representative is for the project.

So the project manager, [00:15:00] so you do have some company representation in here, and then you have all the management team from the contractors. If you have multiple contractors, you have multiple management teams in there. It could be managers, it could be supervisors, whoever it needs to be decision makers for the contractors is who you have to have in there.

And then you conduct these meetings just like you always would. Like you would in your own company, just like you would with any executive advisory committee, you would share observational data. You would create a continuous improvement plan. Remember, these are long-term contractors, so if they're gonna be there for more than a quarter, you should have continuous improvement plans with them.

You can create action plans, you can let them make the decisions. So you're laying everything there, and then they're making the decisions on how to move forward, right? So that's what that committee can do. And then you just continue to do what you always do. If you're following the safety management cycle, you assist in implementing the decisions that this [00:16:00] team made.

You follow the action plans that were created. You create, refine, or edit the policies, the procedures, the SOPs, the training plans. You assess the compliance and the results where you're collecting data, you collaborate with the employees and gather feedback and input, you conduct accident investigations, collecting more data, and all of this goes back to that project advisory committee, whatever you decide to call it, who holds meetings regularly.

And then on a regular basis, you're sharing all of this data with the entire team. You know, your management team, your contractors employees, the contractors management team, right? Just like you would if it was your own organization. And the best thing about this process and following the safety management cycle within this process is that, that EAC, whatever you call it, I think I would probably call it like a contractor advisory committee, [00:17:00] maybe can be part, you know, the, all of these things that you're showing or demonstrating or this meeting that you're having with the contractors, they're regularly meeting anyway with your company representatives.

So it could just be part of that meeting. You don't have to have a whole separate meeting about safety if it ends up being like a really big project and a lot of people then maybe separated, but really you can just have it as part of that meeting. And if you look at this process, you as the safety person, you're not supervising, you're not correcting, you're not telling anybody what to do.

You're not opening up the company to any liability. But all the while you're still influencing the contractors' management team. You're influencing the contractors' employees to follow the safe work practices.

And when you combine having an exceptional contractor safety program to begin with, with all that vetting and the right contracts and things like that [00:18:00] along with the safety management influencer system, you'll feel like you have a lot more control over these contractors who don't even report to your company without worrying about putting your company in a bad spot.

So like I said, I know I've done an episode in the past about contractor safety, so I'll make sure I link that in the show notes. I would also listen to that one in combination with this, and I hope that this helps you out and I will chat with you next time. Bye for now.