Contractor Safety: Benefits of Safety and EMR
Workplace safety is not just about employees. If you want to instill a culture of safety in your workplace, that should involve contractors. This article will look into contractor safety and the benefits of EMR.
What Is Contractor Safety?
As the name suggests, contractor safety is all about ensuring that contractors stay safe in the workplace. Unfortunately, this is not always prioritized, as highlighted by these statistics:
- Companies with fewer than 10 employees or self-employed contractors account for almost half of all deaths in construction sites.
- Nearly half of all serious work-related injuries are not reported.
- A fatal job site injury has an average cost of $991,027 in hospital expenses.
These are just some statistics that highlight the importance of contractor safety.
While the importance of safety in the workplace cannot be denied, the reality is that it is more challenging than ever to ensure it. The bigger the company is, the more difficult it is to keep track of all regular employees, contractors, and temporary workers.
While contractors are not employees of a company, their safety is still the responsibility of the management. The company can be held liable if a contractor is injured on-site. In fact, the financial consequences of that can be more severe than if one of your employees gets injured.
Benefits of Contractor Safety
So, what are the benefits of contractor safety? Here are the main ones:
- Of course, the obvious one is that it helps contractors stay away from injuries or even worse. By having systems in place to keep workers safe, you can minimize accidents and injuries.
- By avoiding accidents in the workplace, companies can save a great deal of money. As cited in the statistic above, hospitalization because of a workplace accident is an expensive matter. Ensuring safety in the workplace, in the long run, is cheaper than paying for the medical care of a contractor.
- It’s not just with the medical costs that a company can save money but with insurance costs.
- There is another benefit of contractor safety from the POV of a contractor. If a large company has specific standards for the safety performance of the contractors they hire, then they can compete on a level playing field against bigger competitors.
- When contractor safety is assured, the job can be finished much faster because there will be no safety incidents that can disrupt the work.
These are just some of the benefits of contractor safety.
Experience Modification Rate
It’s essential to understand what Experience Modification Rate (EMR) is when it comes to insurance. EMR actually has a huge effect on business. It is a number used by insurers used to calculate the cost of past accidents and the possibility of other safety incidents from happening again in the future.
The number is calculated by factoring in past accidents. The lower the number is, the lower the worker compensation premium will be. Many consider 1.0 to be the average EMR.
If a business gets an EMR that is higher than 1.0, that means there has been a worker compensation claim against that company paid for by an insurance company. That low score may stick around for up to 3 years.
There are ways that an EMR can be lowered. The most effective method is by implementing a safety program within the company. This will help improve the safety within a workspace, including the safety of regular workers and contractors. No workplace injuries would mean no claims.
Steps to Guaranteeing Contractor Safety
How can you guarantee contractor safety? There is no 100% guarantee, but specific steps can help decrease the likelihood of accidents happening.
Hire Contractors with Strong Safety Records
One of the best ways to improve contractor safety in your workplace is to hire contractors who are safety conscious already. Check their records before you hire anyone. If you see that they have a safety problem, then that’s a real red flag.
Contractors with a clean record mean that they are conscientious when they are working on jobs.
Check the Safety Record of Contractors
But how do you go about checking the safety records of contractors?
The good news is that it’s easy enough. There are enough publicly available records that you can check. Don’t forget that you can always check the internet for any reviews or even complaints. But the best thing to do is to check several years’ worth of OSHA records. If a particular contractor was involved in an accident, it should show in its OSHA records.
Check the internet, too, because simple accidents might not get reported, but people could write about them online.
Where to Look for the Right Contactors
Now, where can you start looking for the right contractors?
Well, recommendations by the people you know can still help a lot. If they have worked with a particular contractor in the past, then this can really help. Checking the internet for recommendations and possible contractors that you can hire is also a good step.
Some sites can rate contractors. While you cannot trust the ratings all the time, you can get a good idea about a contractor’s performance from those ratings.
So, no matter what industry or niche your business is in, safety should always be at the top of your mind. That means the safety of your customers, your employees, and also your contractors.
While we have come a long way from the days when fatal workplace accidents are common, there is still room for improvement. Accidents that should have been avoidable are still happening daily in factories and workshops.
These accidents injuries, and in the worst cases, they even cost lives. That should be reason enough for you to think about safety in the workplace. Now, if you need expert guidance when it comes to contractor safety, you should get in touch with one of our member contractors for advice. They are leading experts in guaranteeing safety in the workplace and keeping your contractors away from accidents and injuries.