Managing contractor safety is expensive, but accidents can easily cost more than the management itself. Fortunately, there are plenty of steps that you can take to ensure that contractors are safe from expensive and harmful situations. In this post, we’ll discuss how to make your worksites a safe place for contractors and all who visit, which, in turn, can save your organization from the expensive costs that occur with accidents.
Contractor Safety: Preventing Common Accidents
Primary worksite safety concerns:
- Falls: OSHA reports show that fall hazards are the leading cause of injury on construction sites. Many of these injuries can involve contractors injuring their backs, spines, and lower bodies. Severe injuries can lead to time off the job, which can cost you a significant amount of money and plenty of lost productivity.
- Equipment: Contact with equipment is another significant cause of injury for workers. Ladders, machinery, and other tools or vehicles used on the work site can be a huge risk, especially without proper training.
- Lack of Experience: Workers between the ages of 25 and 34 years old face the highest probability of being injured on the site. Whether it’s a lack of experience or lack of training, mitigate this risk by ensuring all contractors and workers are properly prepared before beginning their responsibilities.
Preventative measures and costs:
- Prevent Falls: Tens of thousands of construction workers are injured every year. A majority of injuries are preventable, especially falls. Consider investing in anti-slip flooring and fall protection gear for contractors who work on ladders, or above a certain height threshold. You can also help mitigate fall risks by ensuring that platforms at certain levels are strong enough to handle workers weights.
- Improve Air Quality: If working with chemicals or in enclosed spaces, make sure your contractors are supplied with adequate ventilation and proper protection. Increasing air quality through eliminating or reducing the chemicals released into the air from your worksite will favor well with OSHA officials. This can help reduce fines and keep your company compliant.
Benefits and ROI of Contractor Safety
Aside from protecting the lives of your contractors, there are also financial implications to increasing the safety of your worksites.
Overall, there is a direct cash benefit for increasing contractor safety. According to Liberty Mutual, for every dollar invested in worksite safety, it returns three dollars. Also, safer worksites can lead to increased employee engagement. In fact, according to OSHA, there is a 13% increase in productivity when organizations invest in contractor safety programs. Think about it, when contractors feel safer and feel like their safety is top-of-mind, they will be more engaged in the workplace and feel more comfortable performing their duties.
Creating Safer Worksites
Aside from planning and preparing for incidents by taking direct measures to reduce falls, there are also digitally driven onboarding, training, and certification platforms that can help with contractor safety. In the rails and utility industries specifically, the deeper adoption of web-based training and certification for contractors allows for real-time tracking and monitoring so you can also be assured that your contractors are up-to-date on the latest training and protocols.
Real-time monitoring can also create higher efficiency on worksites and reduce the need for in-person training. As a result, no more wasted days of in-person training or excuses when it comes to contractors or subcontractors not being up-to-speed.
If you have any questions about the benefits and how to increase the safety of contractors on your organizations’ job sites, do not hesitate to reach out to our team by clicking here. Thank you for reading!
**This article is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to constitute legal advice.