Page 59 - Occupational Health & Safety, October 2018

erate contractor time-to-work, and gain insight into contractor safety program quality and trends.
How do you know if your current pro- gram supports the partnership approach you want when hiring and working with contractors? Two critical, but often over- looked, ways to move your contractor safe- ty compliance program toward a partner- ship model are a detailed grading system and a formal audit process with corrective action follow up.
Here’s what those look like:
1. A meaningful grading system
It’s not uncommon for companies to use a simple “approved” versus “unap- proved” status for their contractors, based on a review of information they’ve gathered during the prequalification process about a contractor’s safety program and track re- cord. While this is a solid starting point, a more strategic contractor safety compli- ance program will apply a scoring model to a contractor’s prequalification data and rate the contractor’s safety program in the form of a letter grade A through F.
The advantages of this more exacting grading system over a vague “stamp of ap- proval” are myriad.
For safety professionals, a letter grade arms you with another data point to mea- sure a contractor’s improvements over time and assess whether they are likeminded about the importance of safety and tak- ing the initiative to get better. A static “ap- proved” status can’t tell this story in the same way as a C grade that, over time, be- comes an A.
Letter grades also offer a useful barom- eter when you need to choose between spending your time performing observa- tions and audits on your C or B contractors versus your A contractors.
For in-office or field team members who hire contractors, a letter grading sys- tem gives your team better information as they make hiring choices. After all, don’t you want to hire A contractors over C con- tractors whenever possible? Jobs run more smoothly when your managers are able to focus on project details, rather than worry- ing about whether basic safe work practices are being deployed by a contractor.
Plus, safety and quality typically go hand-in-hand, so hiring A contractors whenever possible helps you deliver high- er-quality results for the business, and that’s
good for the bottom line.
In those scenarios where your contrac-
tor options are limited, knowing that you’ll be relying on a C contractor enables you to proactively put an appropriate mitigation plan in place—for example, do you require one of your own safety professionals on site to provide oversight during the project?
Ultimately, employing letter grades as part of your contractor safety compliance program is a simple, yet effective way for hiring companies to monitor and encour- age safety improvement, guide decision- making, and focus investment of safety resources.
2. Audits and corrective actions
If you’ve not yet introduced contractor safety audits into your program, here’s your chance to make dramatic improvements in safety compliance and provide tools to help drive the C contractors that are critical to your operations closer to an A.
Audits provide invaluable verification that the safety program and policies a con- tractor reports having in place during your prequalification process are, in fact, being successfully put into action. This can be es- pecially important when you employ con- tractors to perform higher-risk activities on your behalf.
Audit results provide you with ad- ditional data and deeper intelligence re- garding the quality of a contractor’s safety program. Does the contractor have records that demonstrate they’re actually conduct- ing required training, inspecting equip- ment, performing JHAs, etc.? Such infor- mation helps inform hiring decisions and target safety efforts and resources – for ex- ample, where to perform contractor safety observations and what to look for during those inspections.
However, to truly partner with your contractors and help them drive long-term safety improvements, your audit program must include providing specific recom- mendations for corrective actions when program gaps are identified. Then, most critically, there should be a follow-up audit conducted that allows you to verify wheth- er recommended program upgrades were, indeed, made.
This process helps drive ongoing safe- ty improvement that can be measured through improvement in audit scores and overall safety letter grades over time, as well as statistics like TRCR (total recordable
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