Workplace safety is a front-of-mind concern for any responsible construction company. Strict adherence and compliance with safety training regulations not only keeps workers safe, but prevents the company from facing heavy fines or jobsite slowdowns due to lack of mandated training completed by workers.
A cornerstone to a safer, more efficient workplace is proper record keeping; tracking who has had what required training, who is coming due for further training, and having that information accessible at all times. But paper-based records are prone to being lost, misread or otherwise inaccessible.
Lee Evans, Co-Founder and CEO of myComply, a new Procore integration partner which offers digital record keeping solutions and training access to construction companies, says the idea for the company was born when its founders noticed this gap. It was very clear to them that there was a need for better technology in construction as it related to safety.
“We started looking at the problem general contractors had verifying everyone on their site was compliant,” explains Evans. “With so many different companies working on a project at any given time, all managing their own safety programs in different ways, it’s really hard to keep the whole site safe unless there’s some continuity and collaboration in the whole program.”
“With so many different companies working on a project at any given time, it’s really hard to keep the whole site safe unless there’s some continuity and collaboration in the whole program.”
In partnership with general contractors advising along the way, myComply was created, devised as a training compliance record-keeping platform that can be easily picked up and used by anyone, and without any cost to construction companies.
Evans says the decision not to charge for use of the platform is part of their strategy for organic, viral growth. The company makes money by referring workers to training centers, and is rolling out a marketplace where workers can find the necessary training to remain compliant.
myComply even helps companies keep track of their workers’ certifications, sending automatic reminders when they’re expiring, which Evans says incentivizes companies to get their people retrained. It also keeps up-to-date certification information available for any worker in the system.
“The reality that every day there’s a new worker coming on a jobsite, we don’t know if that worker has the proper training and it’s time-consuming having to go through the process of pulling out the binder, going through the Excel spreadsheet, trying to see if the worker is in the system. You need to be able to click the search bar, type in a name and know if they’re compliant to be on the jobsite.
“You can’t have supervisors holding up a guy at the gate because they’re trying to call a company’s safety administrator to see if someone is properly trained. You need to have that data in real time so we’re not causing delays in these projects not letting people do their jobs,” Evans says.
Proper record keeping ensures compliance and maximizes safety for every worker, which is the ultimate goal for myComply. At a time where the skilled labor shortage is having profound impacts on the industry, anything that can be done to make the profession more appealing to the next generation of construction professionals is a step in the right direction.
"What we believe is if we're going to try to make construction a safer industry and attract more young people to it, a lot of that is driven by training," says Evans.
"We believe, especially at our company, when you train people properly, they’re much less likely to cause incidents that result in injuries or fatalities. For the men and women who have been in the industry for 10-20 years, machinery is always changing, construction methods are always changing, so refreshing training is never a bad thing, even though it may seem like a waste of time. We firmly believe verifying everyone on the site has a minimum standard for training is mandatory.”
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