Talked with a contractor last month who lost most of a workday because two new hires showed up to a pad without current orientation cards. Nobody’s fault exactly. Everybody’s problem.
FROM THE FIELD
The math on a turn-away is worse than it looks. It isn’t one worker’s morning. It’s the crew that can’t start, the supervisor who spends three hours on the phone instead of on the job, and the operator who now has a note in your file about it. Send six people and two can’t badge in, and you didn’t lose two hours — you lost the morning.
What causes it is almost always the same thing: onboarding requirements live in somebody’s head instead of in a document. This site needs SafeLand. That operator also wants H₂S. A third wants pre-employment testing done before the worker travels. The person who knows all of it is the person who’s out sick, on another job, or left in March.
Three things separate the companies this happens to from the ones it doesn’t:
A written matrix by site and operator, not by job title. Requirements vary by where the work is, not by what the worker does.
Verification before deployment, not at the gate. Card in hand, expiration date checked, before anyone gets in a truck.
One person owns it. When onboarding belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.
Whether you build that internally or hand it to somebody else matters less than whether it exists at all. We do this work, SafeLand, H₂S, pre-employment collections, site-specific requirements but a well-run internal process beats a badly managed outsourced one every time.
This Monday: pull your two most recent hires and confirm their orientation cards haven’t expired. If it takes more than five minutes to answer, you’ve found the gap.
A QUESTION WE GOT THIS MONTH
A supervisor asked whether a worker who completed SafeLand under a previous employer has to redo it. Generally, no, the card follows the worker, not the company, as long as it’s current and the operator accepts that provider. Worth confirming against the specific site’s requirements before you count on it.
If you want a copy of the onboarding matrix template we use with clients, just drop me a message and I’ll send it.
Cheers,
Josh