A site induction is a workflow that involves collecting required information from your contractors and other employees to ensure you stay compliant, presenting information such as emergency procedures, safety regulations, and site-specific introductory information, and getting acknowledgment on check-lists, forms and policies.
While site inductions are important for compliance purposes, they also serve other purposes. Playing a very important role in streamlining your workplace and ensuring all employees, whether full-time or contracted, are informed of all important company information. Not to mention the most important reason, keeping everyone safe!
To all workplaces, safety is at the top of the importance list. Workers are a company's greatest asset and keeping them safe is essential to a successful worksite.
During the site induction, you will have the chance to go through your companies safety procedures and information. Such as emergency exit locations, emergency evacuation procedures, potential hazards around the site, and any other safety points you need to pass on.
By doing this, you're ensuring that all employees, whether they're full-time, part-time or contractors, are aware of all safety hazards.
To build on from the previous point, while very rarely used, emergency procedures are critical to every worksite.
An emergency procedure is a set of steps that people must follow in the event of an emergency to efficiently move themselves to safety.
Generally speaking, your emergency procedure will include:
It's important that every single person who enters your site to work needs to be made aware of the emergency procedures.
In the contractor and construction industry, it's pretty safe to say that potentially dangerous tools will be operated. While most people will have knowledge of how to operate these tools, you need to ensure that everyone has been run through proper tool handling.
As a company, you have a duty of care to your employees, including your contractors. Meaning that site inductions must be performed for everyone to stay compliant.
We know how important site inductions are, whether it's for contractors, visitors or new staff. There's no way around them but there are ways to make them less painful.
Firstly, what's wrong with face-to-face inductions?
Face-to-face is the way inductions have always been done but over time issues have risen:
With face-to-face safety inductions rapidly falling behind on the practicality front, companies have been searching for better options which allows them to automate the entire process.
A solution that enables you to set up your inductions, automatically direct people to completing them and swiftly approve them. All while completely eliminating any need to constantly follow up for the appropriate permits and access requests.
The first obvious choice is to approach a visitor management company but companies have quickly realized most of these companies don't offer enough in terms of workflow building.
Or rather, there wasn't until now...
Sine has recently introduced a new product called Workflows, which allows companies to completely automate their entire induction processes (among all other workflows). Meaning site inductions can now be completed 24/7 with no limitations on what information is included. While also integrating these workflows with Sine's visitor management system. Completely automating the whole process of visitor and contractor management.
Most site inductions will require people to watch videos explaining safety procedures, proper tool handling, and other important company procedures which explains why inductions have taken on a 'classroom' approach.
But with Workflows, you can include all the necessary video's that are required to be viewed in their digital site induction. You can even set them so that they must be viewed to the end before people can progress through the induction process.
Tip - add a questionnaire to the end of your induction to make sure people were paying attention.
As mentioned, the most annoying part of inductions is gathering the appropriate documentation. Countless hours spent chasing contractors and visitors. Filing and creating records. The administrative drain is extensive but, it's needed if you want to stay compliant.
Workflows gives you the tools you need to completely digitize these forms. Where you can then assess submission and approved from the Sine desktop dashboard.
Some permits and access requests can be sent to people to complete but more often than not, this isn't convenient, in fact, it's annoying. The forms need to be printed, filled out, scanned and then sent back. It's especially difficult when you consider most people don't have scanners or printers.
The simple solution is to bring everything online to a platform where workflows can be simply sent, filled out, and approved online. No printing. No annoying processes.
Which is a feature of Workflows.
Not only that, but you can use our geofencing feature so that whenever your visitors or contractors enter a pre-set geofence they will be automatically notified that there are site inductions that need to be completed
When they show up on site, they've already completed the induction, they've checked-in and they're ready to start work.
