What is Contractor Compliance? A Guide to Processes and Best Practices

Managing a large workforce across multiple locations and sites can be tough. Ensuring each contractor and subcontractor are fully compliant while on site without letting them consume all your time… even tougher!

Contractor compliance is a large task to manage by health and safety, and operation professionals. But with you and your team buried in time-consuming work, it’s often wise to make contractor compliance a company-wide mission.

But what is contractor compliance and why is it such a time-consuming task? We’ll help you explore what contractor compliance involves and how your business can improve your contractor management processes and workflows to make managing compliance far easier, including implanting a system like Verature.

If you’re ready to implement a contractor management system that can help you streamline contractor compliance, book a demo now with our team. If not, keep reading on to find out more.

What is contractor compliance?

Contractor compliance is the series of checks and procedures that organisations implement to ensure that contractors and subcontractors coming to do work on site are conforming with regulations and the health and safety standards they’re bound by.

It usually forms part of a broad contractor management strategy, and it seeks to ensure there is continuous contractor compliance at all stages – including before and after your workforce arrive on site.

What are the challenges of contractor compliance?

When it comes to managing contractor compliance, it can become complex with the sheer volume of contractors and subcontractors being processed across multiple sites and locations. The job of contractor compliance can often become unmanageable, particularly for teams that are small or even separated.

A few of the problems commonly encountered in contract compliance workflows include:

Time-consuming tasks for your health and safety teams:

Contractor compliance is a hefty task, particularly for organisations managing high-risk work and a high-volume of contractors and subcontractors entering the site. Managing contractor compliance tasks requires a keen attention to detail and strong understanding of your health and safety requirements and can quickly become a drain on your team’s time and distract them from high-value tasks.

Lack of oversight and workforce visibility:

When you must manage multiple contractors across multiple sites and locations, and have limited resources, it can be difficult to have clear visibility of important contractor data and create and sustain an approval procedure that works, when there in an absence of contractor management software and trying to work against the clock.

Loss of version control over compliance requirements:

With multiple copies of the same accreditations and certificated floating around for one contractor and another contractor, it can be difficult to track which contractor has the correct and in date compliance requirements to be on site, and in need of review. When you add poor communication to the equation, you and your team could miss important details and make costly mistakes!

Changing and evolving standards:

The challenges of contractor compliance can sometimes be made worse by the fact the regulatory landscape is constantly changing. New health and safety regulations are constantly being introduced, amended and overwritten, meaning those members of your team managing contractor compliance need to keep up to date with the moving requirements of what compliance involves.

Why is contractor compliance important?

Contractor compliance is a critical element of every contractor management strategy and effective contractor management system will benefit your organisation in various ways.

Firstly, failing to meet your compliance standards, can cause your companies reputation to be tarnished, and it can jeopardize the health and safety of anyone on your site.

There is also a massive risk of losing time and money, as poor contractor compliance will invite fines, penalties, and damages in the event of an incident or on-site accident when there could a failure to comply with the law.

Effective contractor compliance processes can eliminate multiple risks, including reputational damage, legal action, and poor work experience. That is why It is so important your organisation gets contractor compliance right to begin with.

What are the best practices for contractor compliance?

Fortunately, you can get contractor management software to streamline the onboarding and compliance, while making it easier to automate data collection and set your organisation up for contractor compliance success.

From setting up approval workflows, and setting the standards with document and permit templates, the contractor compliance tools that are in systems like Verature will empower you and your teams to manage contractors and subcontractors confidently, while giving you peace of mind.

Provide a centralised contractor playbook:

When onboarding contractors and subcontractors, it’s useful to have a comprehensive contractor “playbook” or process that can provide direction about how to create and manage contractor compliance. A centralised contractor management system that helps you work through the contractor compliance process, will set out everything which contractors require for approval and ensures you and your team remain consistent in their approach and are aware of the relevant information and regulation that are required.

Create a standardised process and templates:

Creating a standardised contractor management process can help to eliminate uncertainty and minimise the risk of non-compliances. By providing a range of pre-approved templates that can be used on-demand and you and your team can continue to work independently on multiple contractors with minimal risk.

With Verature’s workflows to, you and your team can go through the compliance and health and safety workflows, and populate the system with the correct contractor details, removing inaccuracies and empty fields.

“Verature has been absolutely brilliant to enable us to streamline and align our processes and continue working collaboratively with our contractors.”

Barrie Duncan, Works Manager, University of Strathclyde.

Store contractor details in one central repository:

It’s useful to host and store your company’s contractor details in one place where they can be accessed by your relevant teams on demand.

Creating a central repository for your contractor database is an effective way to gain control over your data, as well as you your document versions, while ensuring that the right copies of documents and certificates are being used. A central repository can improve company-wide visibility and ensure contractors are approached and managed consistently across all departments and site uses.

Set up a compliance approval processes:

Approval workflows are an effective way to ensure that contractor information have been reviewed and approved before arriving on site. These approval processes allow you and your team, and key stakeholders to sign off on contractors without needing to be heavily involved in every stage of the contractor management lifecycle.

With a contractor management system like Verature, users can establish compliance approval workflows that outline the specific order that you and your team should approve the contractors or subcontractors and notify them accordingly. This means that your organisation can rest assured that any non-compliant contractors won’t fall through the cracks and lead to on-site risks.

“Verature has significantly helped us improve how we manage our Contractors coming on to site and improve overall productivity of the team. We now have our very own animated Induction Video and Online Questionnaire ensuring all our contractors go through the same process. The Verature system is brilliant!”

Jo Grunert, Facilities & Workplace Project Manager, Wellcome Trust.

Keep up to date with changes:

The scope of what contractor compliance involves is ever evolving, so it’s important to ensure that your contractor management procedures and compliance protocols adapt accordingly, too.

Those in the contractor compliance process should keep a close eye on the regulatory landscape and how it’s changing. This is necessary to ensure that your contractor management processes are compliant with the current rules, rather than the old ones. Your health and safety teams need to be prepared for changing legal requirements within the industry, so spending the time and resources to remain aware of these developments is key to contractor compliance.

Can Verature help you with contractor compliance?

One of the best ways to improve contractor compliance is to implement a system with features that make the job less painful for you and your team.

Verature’s Contractor Management Software offers a wide range of features that help businesses to streamline and automate their contractor compliance workflow. 100% of clients agreed that Verature has saved them time, effort and ultimately cost.

“Verature is a great system that is very intuitive, dynamic, and user-friendly. The system’s reporting capability provides increased visibility and control of all contractor visits across our multiple sites, ensuring contractors are working safely, with all work and visits approved and recorded.”

FX Plus

Read more about how other businesses are using Verature to ensure contractor compliance is made simple. Alternatively, book a demo to try it for yourself.