Paul Rapuano from workplace safety systems supplier Rapid on how to get to a better onboarding compliance situation than you have now
Why is it important that all workplace personnel are compliant? Ultimately, it’s down to your responsibility as a business partner and employer. If you have invited someone to work with you, if only for a day, then you need to both protect them from harm as much as you can and also your organisation from the fallout of any potential workplace accidents. It’s also super-important to ensure standards are up to scratch across all parts of your operation, from food hygiene preparation or how well your people are trained on performing any key physical or manual processes on-site.
This is about taking responsibility for all the stakeholders you need to care about. The problem is that today, and really for employees, contractors, and visitors alike, most organisations manage visitor or site participation compliance using separate systems or manual processes.
I can understand that it once made sense to start off doing all this with a paper log and then an Excel spreadsheet. But this is no longer an efficient approach, as having multiple individual, unintegrated systems means you can very quickly end up with an incomplete view of all that’s going on in your environment.
Why would that be a problem? Because you’re never really going to know 100% of the time if you have any inconsistent vetting, delays in onboarding, expired credentials going unnoticed, and/or any potential gaps in your team safety training. Without a unified view, across all industry sectors, you’re not applying the same compliance standards across all workforce types, and so potentially increase the possibility of audit failures, heightened risk or legal and even reputational exposure.
Whatever happens, you don’t want those two ever cropping up. Many workplace injuries involve people who’ve been on-site for less than six months, and many of these accidents involve contractors or temporary workers. Inadequate or missed inductions increase the likelihood of safety incidents, and inconsistent delivery of workplace safety best practice almost by definition means your staff don’t always get the same training.
These are strong arguments for an evolution away from fragmented or manual onboarding processes for all the different types of people you want to have on-site at any one time: there is no justification for raising your risk profile. But there are also a strong operational efficiency reason that are positive drivers versus these ‘negative’ ones for consolidated/centralised onboarding: manual onboarding is time-intensive (it often happens in situ, taking people away from their jobs and I’ve seen estimates that it can take three times longer than doing it online/digitally).
I’ve mentioned what I think is a better way of doing this, and it’s time that I got more explicit about what I mean. Increasingly, the use of not just cloud but AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology is making registering contractor companies easier than ever before, as well as much more complete, accurate, and easy to update and check.
For example, we work with customers who use our systems to invite and register contractor companies and induct workers online, meaning contractors can complete their inductions in their own time from anywhere. We also see organisations using us to create customised induction courses for the different groups of visitors or team members they want to protect.
The system can also capture photo ID, enabling workplaces to use facial recognition at access points to automatically identify individuals and ensure only inducted personnel are granted entry, i.e. employing AI computer vision. Then there’s the issue of document tracking and checking; for contractors, proof of insurance documents, e.g., public liability and professional indemnity, are things you need to check and verify. Again, doing that by hand or in a closed system is an administrative headache and requires a lot of attention to detail to ensure things like the insured amount and expiry date are correct.
But with smart software helping do the heavy lifting, documents that contractors upload as part of their onboarding can be automatically verified in seconds. Modern onboarding systems can even auto-correct minor errors in key fields, such as a mistyped expiry date or mistyped insurance amount, saving your back room staff even more fiddly checking.
A better way of cracking the compliance ‘nut’
What I’m ultimately talking about here is a move from what may have been fine in the past for all your onboarding compliance but which is now not fit for purpose, to what you might call “real-time compliance tracking”. That’s a concept that is about you getting total confidence that only fully qualified and inducted individuals are ever going to be on your site. It also stops expired credentials from being overlooked and automatically alerts admins to non-compliance—visibility that slashes the danger of safety incidents, helps you avoid penalties, and strengthens your overall defense in the event of an audit or legal claim.
Importantly, it also improves accountability, as literally every individual’s compliance status is now registered, trackable and accessible in real time. Doing so will save you time, money, and can radically improve your workplace accountability; we work with a logistics firm, for example, that has used real-time onboarding to boost its estimated one-time rather poor 30% full compliance to, by its measurements, more like 98% now.
Putting all this together, I am convinced that sending your piecemeal/non-integrated onboarding workflow out to pasture is well overdue—as it’s now just too easy to upgrade to an integrated, accurate, comprehensive and data-driven way of doing all this instead.
