The second half of GoContractor’s Dublin Breakfast Briefing, held in Ely Wine Bar on November 7th, was devoted to a panel discussion with ESB, an GoContractor client. The panel was moderated by GoContractor Co-Founder and COO Julie Currid, who conducted an in-depth interview with Liam Mannion, a safety specialist, and Padraig Dooley, a project manager. Both men are deeply immersed in the safety culture at ESB and were instrumental in the company deciding to use GoContractor for ESB contractor management.
ESB are Ireland’s biggest energy company and one of the state’s largest employers and have a first class safety record. The health and safety of their workers is ESB’s number one priority but considerations regarding competence and quality control are also taken into account. Although they had an existing online system in place, ESB decided to make a change to further improve how they conducted their orientations. GoContractor enabled them to cut the time of their on-site orientations from one hour to 15 mins, while ensuring quality across the workforce.
Time for a Change for ESB Contractor Management
There were several push factors that encouraged ESB to take a look at how they conducted their orientations. “Insurance companies want to see evidence of how we’re monitoring contractors There were a number of incidents where the HSA [Health and Safety Authority] would be interested in our worker training records. When it comes to people’s competence, skills for specialist tasks like welding, we were not screening these properly and we had some quality incidents,” explained Dooley. These factors made implementing a new system of contractor management a top health and safety priority for the company.
ESB has extensive experience in carrying out orientations for contractor workers. They used to do them in-house, bringing contractors physically into a facility and conducting training and managing their documents. Ten years ago, a central networked orientation system was prohibitively expensive, according to Mannion. When the company began looking for a new ESB contractor management system they knew they wanted something cloud-based, that would enable them to keep track of contractors working, and moving between, at different sites.
Initial Challenges
There were some initial challenges when ESB brought in GoContractor to manage their contractors. ESB have multiple IT systems and bringing in another one was met with some reluctance at first. “We have an ageing workforce, it’s not as young and vibrant as you’d get in a lot of IT companies. There were a lot of challenges to bring in an IT system,” said Mannion. It was important that everyone who was going to use the system had to be aware of the positive impacts to make the implementation of the system a success.
GoContractor worked closely with ESB to develop a system that would best suit the company’s specific needs. Even though some workers were initially reluctant, there are no instances of any worker refusing to use the GoContractor platform. Workers know that if they want to work for ESB they have to do their orientations using GoContractor. At this stage, the system is accepted and very few contractors have issues or problems, according to Mannion.
Engaging with Stakeholders
Mannion points to engagement with staff and all relevant stakeholders, as a key part of ensuring the success of GoContractor in ESB. Getting everyone on the same page was vital and there would have been a lot more resistance had workers not being given the opportunity to give their input. A big takeaway from these consultations was that orientations should be made as simple as possible for the end user. ESB orientations include a huge amount of technical information so this was a challenging task. Mannion found that providing courses with a wide range of multimedia content that catered to different learner types was key in making this information digestible and improving worker retention.
Benefits
ESB decided to use GoContractor for ESB contractor management as it was the service that offered the best solution to fit their needs. The benefits of a cloud-based solution were very attractive for ESB. Switching to GoContractor meant reducing the time staff took to carry out lengthy orientations. The general safety training is carried out on the online system, while the training to do with local and site-specific hazards is done on-site.
Contractors are asked to do more before arriving on site – take training courses, upload documents, keep up to date training records – so it is important that they are satisfied that the new process is worthwhile. The old way ESB conducted orientations , where all of this was done when workers arrived on site, could easily take an hour, so the company had a clear incentive to try and improve how they managed their workforce. Having made the move to GoContractor, general training is done online with site-specific content done at the local plant. What once took an hour, now only takes 15 minutes.
Generic and Site-Specific Content
One innovation ESB pushed for was combining online orientations and local training onto the GoContractor system. Workers can now do a local course, external to the GoContractor training, and have that certified and then recorded onto the GoContractor platform. Staff didn’t want to be using GoContractor for their online orientations and then using a separate system of excel spreadsheets to record local orientations. Site managers can also use the GoContractor platform to change the status of workers who are moving to work in a different site so no one slips through the cracks.
Site managers can assign site-specific orientations for each worker, which can then be recorded in the GoContractor platform. The person who is conducting this local orientation can then carry out a face-to-face ‘interrogation’ to ensure that the worker has a full understanding of what was included in the online orientation. Local orientations can also answer questions around work permits, which is an important component of ESB compliance.
Conclusion
ESB have overcome all the early obstacles they encountered and are now successfully using GoContractor for ESB contractor management, with the number of workers contacting GoContractor support having mainly petered out. They describe their experience with GoContractor as a journey, fortunately this one has a happy ending. ESB found that engaging stakeholders was key to implementing a new system and they are now enjoying time and cost savings, while ensuring quality control across their operations.
