Contractor Compliance for Event Management

A company can hire an external contractor to plan, coordinate, and manage the entire event or just a few selected details. For instance, the organisation could employ contractors for event promotion, porterage, set up and maintenance of stage, sound and lighting systems, visitor management, or provision of catering services. In turn, those contractors may use their own subcontractors to deliver the required services. Indeed, it can take many hands to plan, set-up and run a successful event. However, from talking to our clients, we’ve learned that businesses are sick of chasing down contractors and fear the lack of visibility over their contractor compliance.

How can you make sure contractors, and their subcontractors, follow your health and safety requirements? Finding the time to oversee every aspect of a contractor entering the site for work can require a lot of chasing and sometimes corners to be cut. By eliminating the chase and maintaining compliance with effective and continuous contractor assurance, it is possible to ensure safer and approved contractors, subcontractors, and workers.

So let’s take a closer look at the benefits of using contractors for your events, the risks involved and how to avoid them! 

Using Contractors for Events

Whether they bring funding and sponsorship opportunities, leadership, FM services, security, vehicles or equipment, a variety of knowledge and skillset is the main benefit of hiring contractors for an event.

But, alas, there are downsides to using contractors.  External contractors introduce additional risk, hazards and safety concerns that must be guarded against. A mistake, delay or accident at an event would incur negative public perception and loss of reputation, and have serious repercussions for any future events.

Risk Factors Related to Event Management

While the responsibility for the well-being and safety of attendees may already be at the forefront of an event organisers mind, all risk to human safety and potential injury risk, including that of the contractors themselves, should be considered.

The following are some health and safety risks related to events:

• Lighting failure, plunging an event into complete darkness can incur disastrous results.
• Unqualified or inadequate staffing at events impact crowd-control and security. 
• Obstacles that individuals could run into or strike in the head if an area has not been properly checked and left safe.
• Food safety.
• Surfaces that could cause participants or spectators to trip, slip, or fall because they are uneven, slippery, or have potholes.

Injury-causing accidents and incidents happen frequently setting-up and during events, and the project managers in charge of organising them will not be held accountable as long as reasonable efforts were made to identify the risks and put mitigation measures in place. In other words, the planning team for the event must appear to have handled risks responsibly. So, how can we help your event management process? 

Our Client: Goodwood

Goodwood is England’s most prestigious sporting estate, hosting three of the world’s most renowned sporting events. It is an English estate unlike any other, set in 12000 acres of magnificent Sussex countryside and home to the Festival of Speed, Qatar Goodwood Festival, and much more. Goodwood’s goal is to establish and maintain a financially healthy group of businesses that, both individually and collectively, contribute to the preservation of their heritage.

The company was using separate spreadsheets to manage contractors on-site and the compliance for events held at the estate. The Goodwood Group was searching for a cutting-edge system that could satisfy their needs and lessen the labour-intensive process of managing contractors as they arrived on the job site.

Goodwood has been able to gain control and automation over its event compliance process thanks to the Heresafe Contractor Compliance System. The Heresafe system is giving Goodwood a productive, affordable, and user-friendly way to share information across departments and the company while also giving the team clear visibility over their events, contractors, and compliance.

“The Heresafe system is enabling us to work collaboratively with our contractors and ensure compliance standards. We’ve found the Heresafe Team very easy to work with, the coding is excellent and the system itself is self-explanatory; it is working exactly how we envisaged for this first phase, and we can’t wait to roll it out around the Estate.”

Di Hudson, Group Head of IT, Goodwood Group

The development team at Heresafe was able to determine Goodwood’s need for modification and how they wanted to proceed with the advantages that a Heresafe system could provide through an initial pre-planning meeting. Working together, the Heresafe team has made it possible for the Goodwood Heresafe system to offer:

• A process for onboarding contractors to standardise data collection.
• A database of contractors with pertinent RAMS, risk assessment, and health and safety documents.
• An overall perspective of any event projects will allow the team to assess insurance and contractor compliance.
• A cooperative system that reflects organisational workflow and terminology will allow Goodwood departments to collaborate and operate without interruption.
• Event management to automate email notifications, update information in real-time, and cut down on time spent gathering data from various sources.

How Can Heresafe Help You with Your Event Management

Heresafe is automating your laborious contractor management procedures with a simple, user-friendly system to make sure that maintaining contractor compliance is simple across all of your locations. Lack of standardisation results in lower visibility, lower compliance, and higher human error rates. Heresafe can assist you in maintaining compliance at work, at home, and across numerous sites. We offer time- and paper-saving features like Health and Safety Questionnaires, insurance tracking, RAMS requests, and reporting of work permits and other passes.

With a straightforward, user-friendly solution, Heresafe is assisting companies like yours automate their time-consuming contractor performance management to guarantee consistent contractor compliance across all of their locations. That’s why we have introduced our new Automated Requirement Manager feature (ARM) which we developed for Goodwood to businesses so that you can remain a hands-off host!

By using the ARM, your business can designate a contractor as a supplier of a particular service and set the mandatory standards and qualifications the contractor must deliver depending on the kind of service/work offered. You get all of this while retaining the option to choose more requirements as needed. As a result, you can be sure that your organisation’s compliance needs are always followed while simultaneously lowering the possibility of human error. With the help of our ARM, you are no longer dependent on the host or project manager to be aware of the specifications for a particular service or task provider.

Book a demo today to find out how Heresafe can work with you to have consistent contractor compliance across your locations.