Contractor Forum: Improve Client/Contractor Relationship for Better Safety Performance

Abstract Despite good intentions and goodwill from both sides, the contractor and client relationship often acts as a obstruction to targeted improvement in safety performance. Removing this obstruction will result in an excellent opportunity to achieve a safety goal and increase work performance. Both client and contractor have their own safety standards. How then, do we enhance this client-contractor relationship to create a common understanding among the different companies in an operation in order to meet the set safety requirement? A Contractor Forum is held annually to discuss each contractor’s initiation plan and KPI, whilst the client or company discloses to contractors its safety objective and requests contractor for cooperation in order to fulfil this obligation. A new approach to reduce the client-contractor stumbling block is to look for and analyse the real problems and jointly formulate a solution to improve the overall safety performance. A survey questionnaire of what the obstacles are and how the client can assist to overcome these obstacles was given out. The workshop was conducted based on the findings. The positive feedback from these questionnaires has been valuable and practical in enhancing the client-contractor relationship, creating mutual ‘ownership’ and responsibility of safety goals, which ultimately lead to a significant improvement in safety performance.