Page 35 - Occupational Health & Safety, January/February 2019

and protocols to protect their corporate interests and provide safe work environments for their employees and the contractors they hired. For Procurement, Operations, Safety, Legal, Risk Manage- ment, IT, and other departments, this meant the need to establish insurance bonding requirements, evaluating annual injury/illness logs (comparing rates across industry averages), looking at Ex- perience Modification Rates (the cost of workers’ compensation claims), regulatory citation history, and evaluating contactors’ written safety programs. Many host employers were soon over- whelmed by the administrative burden of managing these annually renewing documents.
In response to host employer needs, the contractor qualifica- tion industry soon emerged. What this niche industry provided was immediate administrative relief to support host employers and contractors. Relief came by way of assistance in collecting and verifying annual assessments, providing web-based dashboards to compare contractors, and a robust repository of collected protocol documentation. As an added benefit, the act of vetting contractors created a competitive environment where contractors knew their investment in safety and safety performance would be measured against similar industry competitors and results would be view- able to host employers who select contractors for future work. This meant contractors could be rewarded with additional work as a re- sult of meeting the expectations of host employers.
Present State
In 2015, The Campbell Institute (the National Safety Council’s environmental health and safety center of excellence) published a white paper titled “Best Practices in Contractor Management.”2 The research project aggregated best practices and common chal- lenges in the contractor management programs from institute members. One of the most significant outcomes of the research was the identification and description of the five stages of the contrac- tor lifecycle (presented below):
1. Prequalification: This is the first step of the contractor life- cycle. In the simplest of terms, the host employer predetermines thresholds for lagging indicators, compliance protocols, and met- rics that contractors must pass in order to work for the host em- ployer. This is often the most time-intensive stage of the contractor lifecycle because it requires investments in time and resources to collect, validate, and score requisite information.
Best practices:
■ Evaluation of traditional lagging indicators—TRR, DART, LWD, EMR—against industry averages. Non-standard: OSHA site establishment citation search, trending of metrics, justification to hire safer performing contractors and utilizing the third-party con- tractor management service provider.
Common challenges:
■ Re-qualification—keeping the contractor information cur-
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