Using independent contractors and not employees is becoming more and more popular for today’s businesses. By using contractors, organizations can scale their operations more quickly and avoid hiring employees, which can take up plenty of time and money. Independent contractors give a company access to additional skills or labor for a short period of time, and allows an organization to eliminate the risks caused from hiring new employees. Managing these contractors, their information and their work can be very difficult, as issues with large workforces can have big consequences, both financial and legal.
Contractor management is the act of selecting and managing independent contractors so that your organization’s workforce gets jobs done properly and stays in compliance. With the right contractor management software, large numbers of workers and their tasks can be managed in a fraction of the time it takes to make phone calls and use paper forms. When managing contractors, it can be a multi-step process, and each step is really important to gain success. Onboarding, collecting and storing personal information and credentials, collecting field data, and tasking workers can be very difficult to manage, especially for large projects that might have hundreds of different workers every week or even every day. Implement a contractor management checklist so you can cover all your bases when hiring and using contractors:
Establish Skill & Job Requirements: When your company has an upcoming project it is extremely important to list all requirements, skills, and types of jobs that you’ll need in order to complete the job. By listing specific requirements you can know who you need to hire and which skills you already have in your organization. For instance, do you need welders and divers to complete the job, or do you need a mechanic who can service large generators?
Create Certification Lists
If your company requires contractors to complete specific jobs, you might consider creating a certification checklist so you can make sure these workers have the correct certifications, credentials, and training. Compliance is key. It could be a disaster if some of the workers didn’t have OSHA certifications or the proper commercial driver’s license.
Onboard Contractors Quickly
Filling out tons of paperwork can waste time and be really inefficient. Lost paperwork causes slowdowns which means workers can’t get started immediately. This could be a big issue if there are deadlines approaching. It’s important to get your people onboarded as soon as possible.
Issue Work Orders Easily
Instead of issuing tasks on paper or making phone calls to contractors to tell them what to do, it would be much more efficient with a system that keeps your managers in contact with your contractors so you can manage their data and tasks. This is where contractor management software can really help.
Contractor Management Software should be designed to help you keep track of the four items on this checklist. Contractor management can be made easier by using software because your people can always know what’s going on and you can avoid the pitfalls of inefficiency, missed worker classifications, and compliance issues. Problems on the job-site can usually be traced back to one of these three issues.Contractor management software can really make the difference, especially when managing hundreds or thousands of workers across multiple projects.