There are many reasons to engage a contractor. They can offer specialised skills, flexibility, and may often be cost-effective as they are only brought on for specific parts of the job. Because contractors are business operators themselves, it is easy to forget you have the same legal obligation to provide a safe work environment to them as you do to your own employees.
According to the Model Work Health and Safety Act, an employer must:
- Ensure the health and safety of workers and others at their workplace,
- Consult with workers who carry out work for the business or undertaking and who are (or are likely to be) directly affected by a health and safety matter, and
- Consult, cooperate, and coordinate activities with all other relevant duty holders.
These duties extend to contractors and subcontractors. The last thing you need on a job site is to introduce more risk to your business, endanger workers, or breach compliance requirements. Yet managing the contractor process, especially on big and complex projects, can prove time consuming and onerous.
Leveraging Tech For Success
Technology solutions can provide the answer to save you the headache. Cm3 - a contractor management and compliance solutions partner - offers a robust ecosystem to streamline the process. Their Australian-based team will assess your contractors to ensure they have documented risk controls, licences and insurances in place.
Online general and site inductions can be delivered prior to starting the job so your contractors are ready to go when they get on site. Additionally, you can manage all the compliance logistics online through Cm3 and integrations with other existing systems you may have such as ERP, accounting, and facility management. What this all equates to is time and energy saved, and risk and liability mitigated. It also provides productivity increases as you and your contractors can get back to core works.
Cm3 also boasts a comprehensive centralised marketplace of nearly 30,000 existing registered contractors, making procurement processes easier and efficient. “As businesses approach Cm3, they have often identified just how expensive, time-consuming, or error-prone their existing or internal systems and processes are, for the management of contractors and suppliers,” says, Rick Tonissen, National Business Development Manager, Cm3.
“By partnering with us, they are able to leverage our dedicated assessment team and evolving digital solutions, to get significant transparency of their supply chain risks and manage them effectively.
“With our Cm3 Marketplace, we simplify the process of finding and engaging qualified contactors for the client. They are often quite surprised to find that over a third of their existing contractors are already on the platform too.”
With all the moving parts involved in your operations, outsourcing your contractor management ensures a streamlined process, keeps your workers and your business safe, and take a load of admin off your plate.
