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At the onset of the COVID pandemic, contractors were some of the highest risk workers. Clustered as they are in people-centric industries, contractors proved hard to protect. Nevertheless, host and contracting organizations still owe a duty of care to these at-risk workers. How’s it going? And what else can be done to protect contractors in the era of COVID?
Increasing challenges to protecting contractors in the era of COVID
Well, the state of play today isn’t measurably better.
Although we know more about the virus, pandemic-related safety rules affecting employees, contractors, and subcontractors change on a dime. Meanwhile, COVID itself charts an unpredictable path, spawning ever more infectious variants.
In addition to confusion over the latest safety protocols, the contractor ecosystem faces other stark challenges, such as guaranteeing the safety of personnel moving between multiple sites, maintaining visibility over on-site personnel, and increasing confusion over supplier go-live status.
The Great Resignation and supply-chain issues ravaging Safety teams and their resources add another wrinkle.
Companies now find themselves lacking the right people, tools, and information to effectively manage their growing contractor workforce.
What can be done for entities who risk losing face, money, and productivity, as well as eroding their core safety culture and falling out of regulatory compliance?
Digital technology solutions to help protect contractors in the era of COVID
Digital safety management technology provides the requisite functionality to manage every aspect of a best-practice safety program. But not all safety management software is created equal when it comes to protecting contractors.
Indeed, enhanced contractor management capabilities are what’s needed to enable organizations to better manage the end-to-end contractor lifecycle, based on unique requirements.
How does it all work out?
Reducing the administrative load of contractor management, the relevant solutions empower contractors to serve themselves, by using end-to-end safety management software to participate in Safety initiatives.
What’s more, contractor self-registration functionality enables contractors to maintain their own company details online, including insurances, inductions, and competencies, simply by clicking a link in an invitation email or scanning a QR code.
And that’s not all. Security teams, in their turn, also benefit from enhanced contractor management functionality, with a full list of relevant functionality for addressing contractor risk in the era of COVID-19 including:
- Streamline the onboarding of entities, workers, as well as plans and equipment
- Share the compliance workload with contractor managers and workers
- Centralize the storage of contractor information in the cloud
- Implement scored pre-qualification processes to ensure contractors meet organizational requirements
- Request documents from entities to track insurances, certificates, licenses, registrations, and plans
- Manage a contractor plan through the upload of plan details, documents, and questionnaires
- Monitor worker compliance by enabling assignment of inductions and competencies for upload
- Automate follow ups through configurable workflows to support contractors to remain compliant
- Capture case notes and actions assigned to contractor workers
- Record details of contractor engagements as part of contractor performance management
- Improve compliance onsite through access control checks
- Search contractor entities based on their service offerings and location
- Broadcast notifications to contractors using templated messages via SMS and voice
- Visualize the status of contractors using real-time analytics
- Generate configurable reports and distribute to personnel
Finally, contractor management was a challenge before COVID. And now it’s gotten even harder.
Digital technology can help. However, best-practice contractor management policy is needed, as well. For more tips and strategies on how to protect contractors in the era of COVID, download our free Guide to Maintaining Contractor Health & Safety After COVID-19.
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