Contractors Are Integral to Many Businesses, Allowing

Contractors are integral to many businesses, allowing them to streamline their services and increase efficiency. However, the use of contractors precludes management from monitoring safety procedures used by the contractors. Contractors operate independently, and therefore may have rules and regulations that conflict with the hiring company. Furthermore, there are often few ways to monitor or oversee what the contractors are doing other than to review their official safety policies. The types of safety measures the contractors use might come into conflict with the core objectives of the organization. Therefore, organizations like ours should have specific guidelines for addressing health and safety concerns related to hiring contractors.

Our organization hires contractors for providing janitorial services, food services, and building maintenance. We have recently decided also to outsource the transportation of our goods. Therefore, a large part of our business depends on how the various contractors are ensuring their commitment to safety. A key factor is the contractor relationship with the client organization. Identifying who supervises the contracted employees is the first step toward ensuring organizational health and safety goals are being met ("Contractor Safety a Growing Issue," n.d.). In some cases, management at the host organization provides "the majority of supervision," leaving the contractor supervisors in the ambiguous role of being figureheads ("Contractor Safety a Growing Issue," n.d.). Role ambiguity is dangerous when it comes to creating and enforcing regulations related to workplace safety. Therefore, it is critical to have an occupational safety component of the legal contract that exists between the service provider and the host organization.

Training is another issue that our company needs to address with regards to its contractors. It must be found out what types of training the contracted employees receive, in order to know whether they are able to comply with general safety rules. Inadequate training of employees means that the contracted employees are probably not going to follow safety standards in their work. Yet our managers cannot be responsible for paying for training that the contractor company management should be providing for their employees. Such things need to be stipulated in the contract.

Contractors might not be familiar with our working environment, and the specific health and safety hazards that we contend with. Without knowing these things, how is it possible to maintain a culture of safety? Therefore, our management does need to offer some kind of orientation when new contractors come to work for our organization. For example, food service personnel need to be aware of the chemical products that we use for cleaning, and also need to know about such things as workplace ergonomics in the kitchen and the temperature of the walk-in freezers. Building maintenance personnel also need to be aware of specific safety hazards, because ignorance of these hazards could lead to deadly consequences. If possible, the contractor company managers need to come on site regularly to review safety issues.