Contractor Safety Management Across Many Sites

Why contractors need their own system

In many industrial groups a large part of the work is done by people who are not on the payroll: maintenance crews, scaffolders, electricians, cleaning and security teams, transport and construction firms. The numbers from industry benchmarks show how much is at stake. In 2024 the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) recorded 42 fatalities across its 24 member companies; 19 of them, or 45%, were contractors, and contractors worked 58% of all hours. In oil and gas, IOGP's 2024 data showed that 726 of 946 lost-work-day cases among reporting members were contractor-related.

Contractor risk is different from employee risk in three ways. The work is often non-routine (shutdowns, work at height, hot work, confined spaces). The people change often, so site knowledge does not build up. And responsibility is split between at least two employers, which creates gaps nobody owns unless the system closes them. A group that manages contractors site by site, with each plant keeping its own spreadsheet, cannot see those gaps.

Who is responsible for what

Using a contractor does not hand over your safety duties. The main frameworks all say so in different words. This is general information, not legal advice; check the law in each country where you operate.

Framework	What it expects
ISO 45001:2018, clause 8.1.4.2 (Contractors)	Coordinate procurement with contractors to identify hazards and control OH&S risks in three directions: contractor work that affects you, your work that affects contractor workers, and contractor work that affects other people at the workplace. Contractors and their workers must meet your OH&S management system requirements, and procurement must define and apply OH&S criteria for selecting contractors.
ILO Convention 155, Article 17	Whenever two or more undertakings engage in activities simultaneously at one workplace, they shall collaborate in applying the Convention's requirements.
OSHA Multi-Employer Citation Policy (CPL 02-00-124, United States)	On a multi-employer worksite an employer can be a creating, exposing, correcting or controlling employer, and can hold more than one role. A controlling employer, with general supervisory authority over the site, must exercise reasonable care to prevent and detect violations.
HSE GB, Managing contractors (HSG159)	Plan all jobs involving contractors, make health and safety one of the key conditions when choosing a contractor, then keep a check on the work and review it afterwards.

For a group, the practical consequence is simple: the host site must be able to show, for any contractor on any day, that the risks were assessed together, the people were competent and briefed, and someone checked the work.

The five-step contractor cycle

HSE's guide Managing contractors (HSG159, second edition, 2011) breaks the job into five steps. They make a good backbone for a group standard because every site, in every country, can follow the same sequence and keep the same evidence.

Step	What happens	Evidence a site should keep
1. Planning	Define the job, identify hazards, assess and reduce risks, decide whether a permit to work is needed.	Job scope, joint risk assessment, permit requirement
2. Choosing a contractor	Set the competence needed, ask questions, get evidence, ask for a safety method statement, decide whether subcontracting is allowed.	Prequalification record, method statement, approval
3. Contractors working on site	Sign in and out, a named site contact, a site induction, checks before work begins.	Daily sign-in, induction record, permit issued
4. Keeping a check	Monitor against the plan; check more for higher-risk work; encourage reporting of incidents and near misses.	Inspections with findings, incidents and near misses, actions
5. Reviewing the work	Review planning, contractor performance and how the job went; record lessons; update the preferred contractor list.	Post-job review, contractor rating

Prequalification that means something

Many groups send a long questionnaire, file the answers and never look again. HSE's leaflet Using contractors (INDG368) lists what is worth asking: how the contractor manages and supervises its work and who is responsible; how it checks the competence of its own subcontractors; its recent health and safety record, including accidents, ill health and enforcement action; the qualifications, skills and training of its workers; and whether it holds the insurance the law requires. Its advice on the answers is blunt: "Don't assume someone is competent, check it yourself."

To keep prequalification proportionate across a group:

Tier contractors by the work, not by the company. A firm that cleans offices and the same firm cleaning a silo are different risks. Set two or three tiers (for example low, elevated and high-risk work) and ask for more evidence as the tier rises.
Use one questionnaire and one scoring rule for the whole group, translated where needed, so a contractor approved in one country means the same in another.
Expire approvals. Certificates, insurance and training lapse; set renewal dates and let the system flag them.
Feed performance back in. Incidents, inspection findings and post-job reviews should change the contractor's status, not sit in a separate file.

On site: sign-in, induction and permits

HSG159 says all contractors should sign in and out, every day they attend, and sign out whenever they leave the site. That record is what tells the emergency team who is on site, so it belongs with your emergency response arrangements, not in a book at the gate.

Every contractor worker should get a site induction covering site rules, alarm and emergency arrangements and the hazards of the area; HSE notes that an induction talk is often the best way to pass this on. INDG368 adds two points that matter in multinational groups: give information in a form people can understand, and pay particular attention to workers whose first language is not the site's language.

Name a site contact for each job: a manager with enough authority and competence to check precautions and decide whether a permit to work is needed. Permits are an essential part of safe systems for many maintenance activities and for high-hazard or unusual jobs. Agree in advance how work will be stopped if a serious concern arises, and make sure contractor workers know they can raise one.

How much checking is enough

No site can watch every contractor all the time, and HSG159 says it does not need to: decide the amount of checking at the start of the job, based on the hazards and risks, and give high-risk work such as permit jobs more contact than low-risk work. Checks at the start and end of each day are a good minimum.

The OSHA multi-employer policy gives useful factors for setting inspection frequency: the scale of the project, the nature and pace of the work (how often hazards change), and what you know about the contractor's safety history and expertise. More frequent inspections are appropriate when a contractor has a history of non-compliance or when you have not worked with it before; fewer may be reasonable where there are strong signs of effective safety efforts, above all a record of consistently high compliance. The policy also points to a graduated enforcement system, with follow-up inspections, as a sign of reasonable care.

Treat contractor near misses and incidents exactly like your own. Investigate them, ask which control was missing, and track actions until closed (see incident investigation and CAPA across many sites). Contractor events are often where high-energy exposure shows up first; see our guide to SIF and potential-severity reporting.

Running it across many sites

The five steps work at one plant. In a group of fifty plants, these design choices decide whether they still work:

One contractor master list for the group. Each contractor company is approved once, with its tier, documents and expiry dates, and each site sees the same status. A contractor suspended after a serious incident in one country should be visible to every other site before it is hired again.
One standard, local add-ons. The group sets the minimum (tiers, induction topics, permit types, inspection frequency by tier). Countries add legal requirements; sites add local hazards. Nobody goes below the minimum.
Contractor events in the same incident system. Separate contractor logs make contractor injuries disappear from group numbers. Use the same categories and severity rules described in our playbook for standardizing HSE reporting across countries.
Scoped access. Site teams manage their own contractors; country and group teams see across sites; approvals stay with named roles.
Audit it like any other process. For certified groups, contractor control is part of clause 8 and will be sampled at audits; see ISO 45001 multi-site certification.

Contractor KPIs for the group dashboard

KPI	Why it helps	Watch out for
Contractor hours worked, by site	The denominator for every contractor rate, and a view of exposure.	Hours are often estimated; agree a method with each site.
Recordable and lost-time injuries, employees and contractors separately and combined	GRI 403-9 asks for injuries of employees and of workers who are not employees but whose work or workplace the organization controls.	Use one rate basis (200,000 or 1,000,000 hours) across the group.
% of active contractors with valid prequalification	Shows whether the front door works.	Count by tier; high-risk gaps matter most.
% of contractor workers inducted before starting	Simple, auditable, early.	Daily sign-in data needed to check it.
Contractor inspections done vs planned, and findings closed on time	Measures keeping a check.	Plan frequency by tier, not one number for all.
Contractor near misses reported per 200,000 hours	A leading signal of reporting culture.	Low numbers usually mean under-reporting, not safety.
% of jobs with a post-job review	Closes the loop into contractor ratings.	Keep the review short or it will not happen.

For how these fit with your wider indicator set, see leading vs lagging safety KPIs for multi-site groups.

Checklist: contractor safety across a group

#	Check	Done?
1	A written group contractor standard following plan, choose, work on site, check, review	☐
2	Contractors tiered by type of work, with evidence required per tier	☐
3	One group master list with approval status and expiry dates	☐
4	Joint risk assessment covering risks in both directions and to other people	☐
5	Daily sign-in and sign-out linked to emergency arrangements	☐
6	Site induction in a language workers understand, recorded per person	☐
7	A named site contact and permit decision for every job	☐
8	Inspection frequency set by risk and contractor history	☐
9	Contractor incidents and near misses in the same system and rates as employees	☐
10	Post-job reviews that update the contractor's rating at every site	☐

Making it work across every site

Contractor control breaks down when the evidence lives in gate books, email and local spreadsheets. AccelSafety, our enterprise HSE software, puts every site on one hierarchy from group to region, country, cluster and site, with access scoped to each person's part of it. Sites record visitor control at the gate, training and competence, audits and inspections with checklists and photos, tools and heavy equipment, and incidents, hazards and near misses reported from a phone; actions and CAPA are tracked to closure; and group dashboards drill back to the source records with their history. Book a demo and we will set it up with a structure like yours.

Contractor safety management across many sites: one standard, every plant