Do you know who’s on site? Keeping safe in construction

Having the best people on board is essential when it comes to maintaining both safety and productivity levels in any industry, not least within construction.  As a business owner operating within the field, the people that you bring on site represent your business and the standard of performance which your company upholds as employees who are visible to the customer the majority of the time. Ensuring each individual has the right experience and qualifications in place during the recruitment process is vital, therefore, in order to maintain both a company’s overall reputation and ultimately a safe working environment too. With this in mind, background checks can prove crucial when looking to secure the right people on site to get the job done professionally, efficiently and above all safely.

By the very nature of the physical work involved, construction as an industry must take safety into consideration when it comes to all of the relevant systems and processes required. A construction site can have numberous people on board at any given time, making health and safety a primary concern at all times in order to prevent physical injuries first and foremost. Here at CBS we believe that, with this in mind, background checks should be included in the hiring process as standard practice to help ensure that not only the most suitably qualified people end up working on a project, but also the most reliable when it comes to the preservation of personal safety too.

The tendency for losses to occur within the construction industry is seemingly more frequent than in some others too. On a building site, at any given time a team is given access to expensive equipment that has the potential to be stolen either gradually over time, or in one big hit that could end up costing a business thousands. In 2015, a survey conducted for the Chartered Institute of Building found that 92% of respondents in the construction industry had been regularly affected by theft, with 21% citing theft as occurring on a weekly basis. For any business, this is an unnecessary cost which cannot be treated lightly and processes must be put in place to help minimise such risks. Background checks can also help prevent such issues arising, as they look at a candidate’s criminal history, previous employment records and qualifications.

It is also important that any checking procedures put in place are consistent across a particular company or group, depending on the size of the organisation involved. A proportion of workers operating within today’s construction sector come from as far and wide as Poland, Romania and Lithuania, for example, with around 12% of construction workers reportedly of non-UK origin. These figures are likely to increase with the Right to Contract scheme due to be introduced in 2017. Upholding consistent screening and employment processes where both UK and non-UK citizens are concerned makes for best practice in the interests of fairness, and to once again to ensure both the personal safety of all employees and the overall reputation of a company is preserved in the process. With many different ideologies and varying practices utilised in many different construction environments worldwide, maintaining consistency across all UK-focused recruitment drives should also come as standard.

In essence, safety on a construction site is not simply reliant on health and safety policies alone, but also depends on which individuals are brought on site and what additional processes are introduced during the recruitment process to help ensure the right kind of help is hired. Anyone who is brought into a business instantly reflects that company and the standard of work it provides. Businesses operating within the construction industry specifically should therefore be looking to establish a team that they can trust, have the right level of experience and the correct qualifications in place in order to maintain a safe working environment and limit potential risks, whatever it takes. If you would like to speak to a member of our team about any screening requirements, you can call us on: 01443 799 900  or email us on: info@cbscreening.co.uk