Contractor Safety Management: Leveraging Best Practices to Reduce Risk

Every year municipalities and governmental agencies regularly set goals for improvement and growth. These objectives can include site expansion or offering new or improved services, and often include the use of contract labor adding to the complexity of achieving safety goals. While contractors bring specialized skill sets that may not exist within the agency, doing so may expose an organization to new or unexpected risks. To complicate matters further, general contractors hire subcontractors to complete the work, and they are responsible to ensure subcontractors comply with safety standards.

The issue of addressing contractor safety and health performance, as well as the potential risks they bring to a jobsite, is a growing interest and of great importance among host employers. A host employer is an employer who is in charge of coordinating work or who hires contractors to perform work at a multi-employer workplace. Host employers have general supervisory authority over a contractor jobsite, and communicate with contractors regarding safety and health program responsibilities and expectations, to ensure the safety of all employees on-site.

Working with contractors that are non-compliant with an organization’s safety procedures can cause jobsite hazards, increasing exposures. Municipalities can be subject to fines when not compliant with regulations, making it imperative to know who is accountable for an organization’s contractors. If a municipality exhibits any control over the work process, the situation can become highly nuanced. OSHA would more than likely attempt to hold them responsible for any incidents under the Multi-Employer Worksite Policy. Under the Multi-Employer Citation Policy, CPL 2-0.1241 (the Multi-Employer Policy), "more than one employer may be citable for a hazardous condition that violates an OSHA standard." It is important to note that OSHA’s Multi-Employer Citation Policy applies to all industries.

Any employer that exposes one of its employees to the hazards created by an unsafe condition, may be subject to an OSHA citation. In situations where an employer's own employees are not exposed to a hazard, that employer may still be subject to an OSHA citation if the employer qualifies as a "creating," "correcting," or "controlling" employer. The OSHA policy was a wake-up call to host employers that prefer the practice of keeping contract employers isolated. In many instances, municipalities will be a “controlling employer,” as they hold contracts with and, therefore, authority over the contractors on-site. Should the controlling employer fail to maintain sufficient direction over their contractors, OSHA can, and most likely will, cite them for their inaction.

Contractor Safety Management Best Practices

There are a number of best practices to assist in managing contractor safety and leveraging them in order to create a more comprehensive, effective program to better protect workers on jobsites and, in turn, the municipality.

The following best practices should be considered to ensure an effective contractor safety management program is in place:

• Pre-Qualification
  A strong contractor safety program, one that prequalifies contractors before they are hired and monitors and manages ongoing safety performance, can ensure that contractors are adequately equipped to alleviate hazards. The pre-qualification process should require contractors to submit their safety and health program statistics for review, such as Experience Modification Rate (EMR), Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART), Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), fatality rate, etc. This information will reveal the contractor’s safety culture and support and ensure compliance with government regulations, avoid fines, protect municipality reputation, reduce municipal liability, prevent worker injuries and potential claims associated with violations.

• Build Safety Requirements into Contracts
  Contractor safety requirements should be included in the contract document to clearly define and establish municipal expectations regarding the contractor’s safety protocols and preparedness. To establish expectations and accountability, contractor incident reporting procedures and investigation protocols should be specified to ensure effective and timely communication with the host employer. Legal contract language should require a contractor’s compliance with federal, state and local regulatory requirements, along with the organization’s safety requirements (confined space policy, lockout/tagout, hot work permits, trenching, etc.). In addition, public entities can also include language requiring contractor safety compliance into their accounts payable processes, to help motivate and enforce contractor compliance. If or when contractors fail to maintain safety compliance, payment is withheld until compliance is achieved.
   
• Pre-Project Task and Risk Assessment
  A pre-project task and risk assessment should be performed to evaluate the risk of the project’s scope of work, as well as the contractor’s specific work plan to estimate the level of risk and probability of safety incidents occurring to include factors such as severity, cost, etc. Depending on the calculated risk category results, the host employer may request additional written safety and health plans from the contractor for further review.

• Contractor Orientation and Training
  Safety orientation and training is a tool that organizations use to educate employees about their safety culture, including contractors. Onboarding training must communicate safety policies and expectations to contractors and train them to safely perform job duties, prior to their first day on the job. Training should include education regarding municipal safety and emergency procedures, work permits, certifications and jobsite requirements. Requiring contractors to complete induction training provides assurance that they are prepared with the most effective, relevant training for the jobs they are hired to do. In addition, detailed training should efficiently and effectively prepare contractors to safely operate machinery and understand how to mitigate the unique safety hazards of their jobs.

• Monitoring of Project
  Periodic jobsite walk-throughs and regular on-site inspections are effective methods to monitor contractor safety performance. Audits can be conducted by municipal resources, while some organizations utilize outside vendors to perform these assessments. Using outside vendors enables municipalities to supplement their internal audit process, and provides an objective view from outside the organization.

• Post-Project Evaluation
  Organizations with contractor safety programs may choose to go beyond contractor prequalification by implementing safety performance into post-project evaluations. The results of contractor safety audits also provide the organization with additional measures to track contractor performance and make decisions regarding inclusion in future bid invitations.

• Contractor Re-Qualification
  In an effort for continuous improvement, some organizations have created a single contractor database to ensure all information is current and accessible, and to achieve consistent communication regarding the status of qualified contractors. If properly maintained, the database would clearly identify contractors that are no longer pre-qualified, (missing or outdated documentation, safety performance changes, financials, etc.) and would be required to get pre-qualified again.

• Third Party Pre-Qualifying Vendors for Contractor Management
  Another option that organizations are exploring is the use of third party vendors to manage their contractor pre-qualification process for them. In doing this, the vendor can review and manage the contractor review process while reducing the workload for the public entity. In addition, vendors can customize contractor questionnaires to focus on leading indicators and safety observations. 

Contract workers are a vulnerable population as it relates to serious injuries and fatalities on the job. With contractors often performing within higher-risk professions with little to no supervision, it is a best practice for municipalities to maintain a formal contractor management program. Not all contractors will follow safety protocols and procedures when left to their own devices. Budget, schedule, and manpower are just some of the factors that can result in contractors not adhering to established safety protocols. The primary objective of any contractor management program is to maintain a healthy and safe work environment for the project and its employees. Should an injury occur, with the proper management programs in place, the organization should remain confident they have done all in their control to prevent it.

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