The Do’s and Don’t of Sub-Contractor Orientations

The on-boarding process for any company is vital in regards to employee retention and productivity. For this reason, it is important for every employer to know what and what not to include in their orientations. With years of experience on the subject and insight from many employers, our COO, Julie Currid goes through all the do’s and don’ts of a subcontractor orientation.

Julie mentions many problems employers may encounter from their orientations such as:

• Information overload
• Dull and repetitive information within the presentation
• Covering subjects that may be irrelevant and unnecessary to particular employees
• A lack of follow up with the new hires

She also goes through some positive qualities that come from a good subcontractor orientation including:

• Reduced nerves for new employees
• Improved productivity on site
• Reduced probability of accidents
• Increased retention rates

There are a variety of ways in which you can create an attention-grabbing subcontractor orientation to keep your workers informed and interested in what you have to say. For example, visually stimulating content has more of an impact on workers than words on a page.

To learn more on how to create the best subcontractor orientation for your contractors, click on the video below or visit our website for more information on online orientations.

Transcript:

We work with a few companies that you’re probably familiar with; the likes of ESB; Bord na Mona; Calor Gas; a lot of the construction companies in the UK and the US; Balfour Beatty, Bouygues, ISG, all of the biggies. They all use our online platform to deliver customized orientations and to manage their contractors.

I’m not really going to talk about GoContractor. I’m going to talk about what we have learned from our customers:

The general norm that we see is that contractors are getting the same information again and again when they arrive at a different site and they’re not necessarily learning anything new, and they’re being told this is our corporate culture and here are our safety rules and please make sure you fit in accordingly. So, in a lot of cases, they’re in a classroom, they’re distracted, they’re falling asleep, they’re not very engaged with the whole situation.

To start off, the objectives you are likely to have in an induction, particularly with a subcontractor, are you want to get their paperwork in order, their Safe Pass, their CSCS, all of their expiry details. You want to set up a way of being able to track that as the site moves, to get a notification if something has gone out of date.

You want to engage them in the company culture. You want them to know what the project is all about, what the aims of the project are, what stage you’re at and how it’s going to change in the future. And obviously, you want to instill some safe behaviors in them. That might be done initially, and you might try and enhance that as time goes on with toolbox talks and other on the job training.

The common complaints that we hear from subcontractors:

Orientations are very boring. It’s the same kind of information in a classroom environment. We see a lot of the powerpoints and videos that companies use and, to be honest, you could replace the logo, and you wouldn’t actually know the difference. There’s a bit of an information overload and it’s often in the same format. If a company is using video, they will use video throughout. Or if they’re using text, they’ll only use text. A lot of the time they won’t even use videos. You can understand why this would be boring for the subcontractor.

There’s rarely any follow up to make sure that people understand the information. This information might be called upon again further down the line, and this is the only way to actually change their behaviors and get the information into their heads. In some cases, you are delivering the same orientation to every single contractor no matter what work they’re doing. Someone who’s going nowhere near asbestos might be being taught about asbestos, they might feel it’s not particularly relevant so they lose interest.

What is the result of a bad subcontractor orientation?

If you have people arriving and they sit for 2 hours, and they get a video orientation they’re pretty bored by it. They’re looking out the window, and they have to go at the pace of the slowest person in the room. There is a huge reduction in productivity when they start. We know there is an increased risk of workplace accidents if they are not taking the information onboard. Also, if you have a greater turnover of workers, if contractors are coming and going, then we know that people who are less familiar with the site are more likely to have accidents.

So you are actually doubling up on the likelihood of having a workplace accident. You are stunting the worker growth. The company has the opportunity to get the worker onboard and excited about the project and to teach them something new. In a lot of cases we see, this opportunity is not taken, and the worker is fed the same information again. The result of this is that your mission and culture just stops dead once a worker steps on-site. At head office, you might have put loads of work in branding and specific safety brand but is this reaching the ground level?

What is the result of a good subcontractor orientation:

• Reduces nerves. We all know when you’re starting on a new site, it can be quite nerve-wracking especially for new workers who are at a higher risk than workers who have been around for a while.
• The burden on other people on-site can be reduced by a good orientation.
• It connects everyone to a common vision.
• It can improve productivity because workers are ready to hit the ground running.
• You will reduce incidents and accidents.
• You will improve your culture and your reputation.
• You will improve retention of your contractors.

We’re an Irish company, but we have an office in the US. There’s one particular story in the US that’s become well known, that is of a worker who started and was delighted to get a job because unemployment was quite high. On his first day, he took a selfie in his hi-vis gear and sent it to his girlfriend just before he started his job. He wasn’t given any training at all, and within 90 minutes the guy was dead.

That’s because he hadn’t been given any training and he was crushed by a machine on the site. If he had been given a subcontractor orientation, the thoughts from OSHA are that he wouldn’t have been standing in the wrong place. He would have to know that information.

The first thing to remember when you’re trying to develop engaging content is that we all learn differently:

Visually stimulating content is going to be remembered much better:

In fact, it’s going to be remembered at a 65% better rate after three days. With retention, what’s important to understand is that this information will go into your short-term memory and will not go into your long-term memory unless you have to recall it again and again. Obviously, this is difficult in a subcontractor orientation. However, with things like toolbox talks and technology you can build this in through an app, through GoContractor, so the person is required to recall this information again while they’re on-site.

Adults typically don’t like instructor-led based learned as much as they like self-based learning.

The reason for that is they have to go at the pace of the weakest link within the classroom. With self-based learning, they can go back again and download information if they need to revisit it. They can always go back and review a safety statement or any other documentation you want to provide for them.

And then, repetition.

One way to take advantage of the rules of repetition is to prepare a worker in advance with lots of information, and when they arrive on-site, you pull out that really important information for the first ten or fifteen minutes. They’re prepared, their nerves are lower, and they’re nearly ready to hit the ground running.

Did anybody see this meme going around the internet? This poor chap fell asleep on his first day of work, and of course, the internet gurus got their hands on it, and it went viral. The point is that he wasn’t particularly excited on his first day of work. Some ways to stop that from happening:

Ask the individual to show you what they can do on their first day.

There is an advantage in that you can see if there is a skills gap. But more so, it’s to say we actually care. ‘We know that you’re an individual so give us an idea of what information you already have in your head.’ The GoContractor model would be to deliver as much as you can online beforehand and then when they arrive on-site you do more of an interactive session with them.

Identify the newbies:

We know that the newbies on-site are the ones who are highest at risk. So that’s what a learner sticker is for. Have a way for them to stand out, so all of their colleagues know.

Connect workers:

Set up a buddy system, so workers feel comfortable going to someone. They know it’s that person’ responsibility to do that.

Gamify it:

Orientations are a pre-existing system, everyone knows it. So how can you actually gamify something like that? Well, if it’s done online, you can gamify it with the contract companies. So, if you’ve decided you’re going to run alerts throughout the year or online toolbox talks during the year, the best contractors are the ones who get their workers through within a week. Assign stars to these companies. That’s one way to gamify it.

The five steps for a subcontractor orientation we recommend at GoContractor:

1. Do the boring stuff online beforehand: The system allows you to take photographs of the people as they’re going through it to make sure it is the right person who shows up on-site. It allows you to ask a series of questions, do video content, powerpoint, anything like that.
2. Engage in pre-boarding: Get all their documentation in advance. Don’t have people queueing up just to get a photocopy of their Safe Pass card or anything like that. Do it all online in advance. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t. Everyone has a computer in their pocket that they can use to take a picture of their Safe Pass card.
3. Make it targeted and varied: Make sure that the right groups of people are getting the right kind of information. Don’t just to do a spray and pray to everybody because people will become disillusioned if the information is not relevant to them.
4. Make it human: This literally means to put humans in it. If it’s an online subcoontractor orientation, do a video. It’s very easy to create video content nowadays, and a lot of companies are very concerned with their corporate image.
5. Set milestones and goals: Setting the expectations for the worker. You will be tested on this at one point. You will be getting a refresher within X amount of time. We will be coming back to you again and gamifying that with reward systems so that they know it’s worth their while to continue engaging with it.

So that’s it!