Compliance & Verification Management

The need for compliance in construction and utilities

When organisations undertake any project dealing with construction or utilities, they must manage their own employees, as well as those working for contractors and subcontractors. After all, from a compliance and liability standpoint, the lead organisation carries the responsibility for ensuring everything on a work site - including employee licenses and certifications - is up to standard, mitigating as much risk as possible. This means ensuring that their own staff hold relevant certifications, checking that all qualifications are current and up-to-date, and performing due diligence to be sure that the same is true for all contracted and subcontracted employees. After all, any organisation that secures a contract on behalf of a client is responsible for performing these checks on everyone being brought on to the project. Failing to meet this legal obligation of ensuring compliance can put a company at risk, potentially exposing it to millions upon millions of dollars in damages - not to mention the negative publicity of going through the court system, being exposed to lawsuits or harming professional relationships and reputations.

Safety is not something to be taken lightly, and with government bodies dedicated to employee safety, companies must mitigate risk as much as possible. During the onboarding of new employees - and regularly after that - human resource teams must map out employee experience, skillsets, qualifications and certifications. This provides greater visibility into two key areas: how employees fit into regulatory and company requirements, and how project needs are addressed by existing worker capabilities. These vary greatly from project to project, so HR teams must maintain accurate and up-to-date employee competency profiles. Such a record is essential for being able to rapidly deploy workers to new projects.

Problems with manual record keeping

In many organisations, compliance management namely licenses and qualifications are recorded in documents and spreadsheets. Such a process presents a number of issues that can spring up down the line.

• Labour intensive: Recording and updating this employee information is time-consuming, diverting administrative focus away from other key functions.

• Unmanageable: In larger companies, there are simply too many employees for manual record keeping to be practical. This issue is compounded as employees often hold multiple certifications and qualifications, further increasing the workload for administrative staff.

• Contradictory: When this task is handled manually, there is an increased risk of contradictions arising between different document versions. These multiple sources of truth can lead to excess work sorting out which file is the most accurate or recent.

All told, manual human resource management is simply too risky for organisations that depend on accurate and easy-to-access employee records. An automated system that resolves these shortcomings is a more modern and effective solution.

The benefits of automation

Seera’s cloud-based platform simplifies the recording and tracking of skillsets, qualifications & licence, training & HSEQ management giving organisations essential visibility in capabilities and overall compliance. This perspective can easily extend to contractors and subcontractors, guarding against risk at all levels of project involvement.

Seera makes it easy to gather, manage and view employee records into a single source of truth. This reduces noncompliance risk, administrative inefficiency and the time required to maintain these records. With all information contained in a unified platform, companies also have access to reporting and analytics capabilities that let them proactively monitor and track licenses and certifications. HR teams can create alerts and notifications that warn when a qualification is due for renewal, ensuring there is never an unnecessary gap in skills coverage.