Streamlining Construction Compliance: How to Stay Safe, Legal, and Sane

Jobsites are regulated by strict compliance requirements that can delay a construction project for longer than anticipated. Preventing delays means being proactive about compliance at both the state and federal levels. But how do you manage the numerous steps required to ensure a jobsite is compliant while reducing wasted time? 

3 Ways to Improve the Construction Compliance Process 

Gone are the days of clipboards and pens. Using technology to replace dated manual processes is the most efficient way to overcome compliance challenges. The most effective construction projects use project management software to track and correct compliance issues in real-time. Moving to a digital process can streamline your compliance process and drastically increase the productivity of your project. 

Let’s look at 3 challenging steps in the compliance process that improves with a digital approach. 

1. Standardize Compliance Documentation

Subcontractors are responsible for ensuring compliance daily. They collect a lot of data from various areas of a jobsite with multiple forms. Common compliance processes can include incident reporting, safety checklists, property inspections, and quality control inspections. 

Manually creating or locating compliance forms makes it difficult to guarantee the right information is being collected on time. Construction management software allows you to easily create universal compliance documentation that can be utilized across departments.

Avoiding redundancies means making sure everyone is on the same page. When it comes to compliance, document standardization can mean the difference between a safe work environment and a life-threatening incident.

2. Track Compliance Audits & Checklists

Various team members are often responsible for completing compliance documentation in their respective departments. Audits may be performed daily, meaning countless data points are collected every week. 

For a general contractor or safety director, tracking down the progress of these audits manually can seem impossible. Digital checklist apps streamline this process by allowing team members across departments to perform audits, report incidents, document compliance with photos, and obtain important signatures with their mobile devices. 

Project managers can access all compliance documentation through the app and assess its completion in real-time. Compliance issues that affect the safety of workers need to be corrected immediately. 

The digital process prevents important compliance paperwork from being skipped.    

3. Review & Share Compliance Reports Across Departments

Once compliance documentation is complete, it needs to be aggregated and shared with key project stakeholders. This information is vital when assessing the level of compliance or submitting documentation that ends project delays.  

With a manual process, paperwork can be easily misplaced during a review. Delivering compliance documentation becomes laborious and time-consuming. 

Today, construction management apps centralize your documentation in a single location. Sharing reports with management or tracking compliance trends becomes an instantaneous process. 

Safety directors are also empowered to create custom reports with data from all compliance documentation for use in safety bulletins or compliance meetings. Construction management software speeds up the sharing of information and increases the integrity of the compliance process.

Helpful Resources: OSHA Compliance Templates 

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is a federal regulator responsible for ensuring all workplaces are safe for workers. Their compliance standards are some of the most common on a jobsite. Construction projects are required to comply with OSHA regulations or risk long project delays and workplace accidents. 

Every year, OSHA releases a list of the ten most commonly cited compliance issues its compliance officers encounter during jobsite inspections. The list increases compliance transparency and makes safety directors aware of the most common infractions they should keep an eye out for.

As a construction management software provider, we’ve encountered every OSHA compliance issue and created numerous templates that make your job easier. 

Increase Your Productivity with GoCanvas

GoCanvas is a project management tool that’s useful at any stage of a construction project. Stakeholders can create documents with ease, track their completion, and share them with anyone. 

GoCanvas also offers an analytics feature that pulls actionable insights from all the information found in your project management apps.

Take the next step in streamlining your compliance process by scheduling a GoCanvas demo. We guarantee the positive impact it’ll have on your organization.