Establishing Contractor Best Practices as Operations Leaders in Rails & Utilities

To manage the safety and security of unsecured environments, communicate effectively with line management, and maintain compliance to keep OSHA away, you’ll need to establish benchmarks for your worksites. In this post, we’ll help you understand why it’s critical to create goals and contractor best practices around timeliness, budget, specifications, and safety to achieve the greatest success.

We’ll discuss how the best methods for establishing these goals and then how to approach the next steps for attacking and measuring for positive long-term results. Let’s get started.

Importance of Establishing Contractor Best Practices and Benchmarks

Some of the most highly sought after companies are setting quantifiable goals and measuring those on a regular basis to achieve amazing results. It’s much too easy, and common, to create an action plan, kick it off, and then forget to stick to the plan as time goes on. In fact, out of those who set personal goals around the New Year, nearly 90% fail to follow through. It happens to the best of us. But companies that attack their goals, measure results, and change the course of action based on those results are coming out on top.

Execution Example – OKRs

Take tech giant Google, for example. The innovative company borrowed an employee grading system, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), from Intel as a simple way to create structure around managing teams. To achieve success with OKRs, you’ll start by establishing an objective, then you’ll set up key results that are quantifiable and will help you hit your objective. It’s critical that your objectives are measurable and not general. You should also break the larger goal into smaller, bite-sized goals, which are easier to comprehend and thus, easier to achieve. For instance, let’s say you want to reduce worksite errors. Instead of making that a general statement, say that you want to reduce worksite errors by 15% then come up with three ways to achieve that goal in a six or twelve-month timeframe.

When working with multiple contractors on large worksites, such as those in rails and utilities, establishing best practices and quantifiable goals will ensure that you’re meeting your OKRs, while better managing your dynamic workforce. For example, if safety is one of your OKRs, you can create specific standards around your safety goals. These must then be understood and practiced by each vendor and measured to track incidents. Based on your results, you can adjust your standards to achieve better results.

Other Benefits of Benchmark Setting

Establishing best practices can also help innovate processes. When operations managers fail to benchmark, there is no way to evaluate performance and aim for higher performance. Best practices and benchmarking are critical, but they cannot simply be measured and forgotten. While measurements can identify problems, they don’t lead to actionable solutions. A qualitative approach is also essential in the benchmarking process to understand how to mitigate issues and come up with a plan to increase success moving forward. You can also work with other teams to bounce ideas back and forth to see how they handle similar issues and work together to create innovative solutions that will benefit the entire organization.

Executing a System of Tracking Contractor Best Practices to Maintain Compliance

Establishing best practices and benchmarks for success is the first step in increasing efficiency. Now you’ll need an effective method for tracking. Thanks to the advent of technology in the vendor space, there are digital tracking platforms that can help operations managers monitor contractors and subcontractors on worksites.

These platforms use GPS and wifi to provide real-time access to worksites with widespread workforces to help monitor contractor best practices such as safety and location check-ins. This technology can even potentially serve as an in-ear expert to walk individuals through tricky situations. And, as the cost of these technologies decreases with increased adoption and use, it will make post-incident reporting to OSHA, other regulating bodies, or contracting companies like Union Pacific much easier. Plus, the data collection will give real-time access to results, which will allow your team to evolve benchmarks as needed, allowing teams to stay agiler.

We are here to be a resource for anyone working in the rails, utilities, or even venue management industries. If you have any questions about establishing contractor best practices and the methods for monitoring, do not hesitate to reach out to here our team by clicking here. Thank you for reading!