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However, unlike many areas of grounds care, the high risk, high liability context of snow and ice clearance is unlike lawn mowing or hedge cutting. You can’t simply cut costs by doing it less often. Slips, trips and falls are responsible for over a third of all reported major workplace injuries and organisations have a duty of care to mitigate these risks to ensure the health and safety of both staff and visitors. Effective winter maintenance is critical to reduce the risks of accidents on premises and partnering with the right specialist can provide an opportunity to manage costs, while achieving far higher standards of safety.
Yet outsourcing is not without its own risks. A key challenge is understanding what to expect and what to specify when tendering for winter maintenance services - especially as the quality of offerings has become increasingly varied as some providers have transformed their services through technology while others have lagged behind. This is producing real differences in capabilities, standards and value for money. Today’s best in class services have adopted a data-driven approach, triggering site visits based on advanced weather forecasting to ensure that proactive gritting is undertaken just when it’s needed and avoiding the expense of gritting unnecessarily.
One advantage of keeping snow and ice clearance in-house is that it can be easier to keep track of your own teams’ activity. Yet this is where technology is also helping by enabling service providers to offer high levels of transparency and accountability through live reporting via customer portals and dashboards. We’ve all heard horror stories of contractors not turning up and leaving sites unable to open, but it can also be problematic if they are doing the work but can’t demonstrate what they’ve done and when they’ve done it. Especially when accidents occur, accurate and accessible records are vital.
At Grounds Care Group, our own investments in technology - and in advanced weather forecasting solutions from the Met Office - ensure that we can efficiently keep our customers sites up and running. We can offer peace of mind through minute-by- minute live reporting and serve as our customers’ eyes and ears on site. I would argue that, in this day and age, there simply is no excuse not to expect this level of assurance when outsourcing winter maintenance. Even so, even very established providers are still charging a premium without delivering that level of service.
Naturally, these dynamics aren’t unique to our sector. Just as outsourcing isn’t a silver bullet solution to labour shortages, the old approach of throwing manpower at problems can simply entrench inefficient practices. In the wider economy, there’s been much discussion of how better training and technology investments can help to unlock greater productivity. Ultimately this is what matters in outdoor FM too – getting the right people working smarter, and sourcing expert support where in-house resources are limited.
For further information on how to keep your business operational and compliant this winter call the Grounds Care Group on 0800 122 3376 or email
info@gcgrp.co.uk
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