This week’s Safetip is about deploying a mobile app to encourage contractors to report incidents, near misses and observations.
The Use of Contractors Is Growing
The use of contractors and subcontractors is growing. According to a , almost half of surveyed organizations reported that more than 40% of their work is completed by contractors, while 23% of organizations use more than 1,000 contractor companies.
Due to the growing use of contractors, contractor safety should be high on the agendas of EHS departments. The safety performance of a company is greatly impacted by the safety performance of contractors and subcontractors brought on the hiring organization’s worksites.
Increasingly organizations cannot rely solely on their own workers to help identify hazards and risks through the reporting of incidents, near misses and observations.
Deploy Mobile App to Contractors
As part of an occupational safety and health program, hazards and risks in the workplace should be identified. Workplace inspections and incident investigations are effective ways to identify hazards and risks. But information reported by workers directly from the field is also a critical input for hazard and risk assessments.
To encourage the reporting of incidents, near misses and observations, deploy to your contractors the same EHS mobile app used by your own workers. By making it as easy as possible for contractors to report events and observations, they will be more likely to do so. The information reported by contractors will then allow you to improve safety for everyone, your own workers and contractors alike.
Also, use data from incidents reported by contractors through mobile devices to better benchmark individual contractors between themselves and with your own organization. This helps to determine which contractors have the best safety performance and therefore should be retained for future work projects. To achieve this, be sure that your incident management system calculates incident rates for each individual contractor based on the work locations where incidents took place and the types of users who reported the incidents.
Visit Enablon Insights again next Wednesday for a new Safetip!
