Working on Your Premises
Requiring somebody to work at your place moves a factor, and it brings obligations that attach to controlling a site rather than to employing anybody.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. A deadline is not a shift, and the difference is visible from outside.
Somebody is working on your site who is not your employee
Whether they are an employee for tax purposes
Decided separatelyDecided by: The tax authority, on its own test · On: What was agreed, and what actually happened week to week
Who owes them a duty of care while they are on the site
Decided separatelyDecided by: Usually statute, and the regulator that enforces it · On: Control of the premises, which is generally yours whoever they work for
Whether your insurance responds if they are hurt
Often follows the othersDecided by: The insurer, on the policy wording · On: How the policy describes who is covered, and what you declared
Whether they can bring a claim about the work itself
Decided separatelyDecided by: A tribunal or court, on its own test · On: The day-to-day reality, which usually outweighs the paperwork
Whether having them on site changes anything for your landlord
Not settledDecided by: Whoever holds the lease, on its terms · On: The lease, which nobody reads until it matters
Five questions, five different deciders, and the safety one does not follow the contract at all. Duties attached to controlling a place frequently apply whoever the person works for, and that is the point most often missed. Which duties apply, and to whom, differ by jurisdiction and by industry.
Requiring somebody to work at your place moves a factor, and it also brings a set of obligations that attach to controlling a site rather than to employing the people on it. Those two things are frequently confused, and the second one catches businesses out more often than the first.
The boundary discussed in “Working on Your Premises” should be explicit before any workforce data is collected. A company evaluating Monitask guidance on how to measure employee productivity for how to measure employee productivity can use agreed time and project context, provided contractors know the purpose, can correct records and are not judged against employee-style attendance rules by default.
Some work can only happen where the work is. Nothing here argues against that.
For another operational perspective on “Working on Your Premises”, consult World Commerce and Contracting resources. Compare it with the actual statement of work, jurisdiction and supplier relationship before adopting a general practice.
When the place is part of the job
A great deal of work has no alternative: anything involving your equipment, your stock, your building, your customers, or people who cannot leave the site.
Where that is true, the location is a property of the work, it goes in the engagement, and nobody looking at it later finds it surprising.
When the place is a preference
The other category is larger than businesses admit. Work that could be done anywhere, required to be done at a desk in your office, for reasons that come down to visibility, culture or habit.
That is a choice, it moves a factor, and it is worth making deliberately. If the reason is that somebody wants to be able to see the work happening, that reason is addressed elsewhere in this section and the answer is not a desk.
The permanent desk
A specific desk, with a name on it, in the team area, is a small thing that reads loudly. So does a locker, a parking space, a place on the seating plan and a photograph on the wall.
None of these is decisive and all of them are the sort of detail that appears in somebody's description of what the arrangement looked like. The practical question is whether each one is required by the work.
Safety duties, which do not follow the contract
This is the part that genuinely matters and the part most often assumed away. In many places, duties about the safety of people on a site attach to whoever controls the site, whoever those people work for.
A business that has decided a contractor is not its responsibility because they are not an employee has, in several jurisdictions, decided something that is simply not available to it. This is worth checking properly rather than assuming, and it is a question for somebody qualified where you are.
Access and the building
Passes, keys, alarm codes and out-of-hours access are practical requirements with the same property as system accounts: they are usually issued permanently because the process has one setting.
Scoping them to the engagement and setting an end date when they are issued costs nothing at the time and solves two problems at once.
Insurance
Worth establishing before anybody arrives rather than after something happens. Whose policy responds if the supplier is injured, if they damage something, or if their work causes a loss to a third party.
The answers differ by policy and by place, and the common failure is not getting it wrong but never asking. A short conversation with whoever handles your cover, once, covers every subsequent engagement of the same kind.
What the supplier should hold
In most trades an independent supplier carries their own cover appropriate to the work, and asking for evidence of it is ordinary commercial practice rather than an imposition.
It is also, usefully, one of the things that distinguishes a business from a person: a supplier who has never considered insurance and expects to be covered by yours is telling you something about how they understand the arrangement.
Hybrid, and the day that became fixed
The most common current pattern: the supplier comes in on Wednesdays. Nobody decided it, it started because of a meeting that no longer happens, and it is now a fixture.
Fixed days are the location version of fixed hours and they accumulate the same way. The repair is the same: attach it to something, bound it, or drop it.
Being introduced to visitors
A small matter with an outsized effect. How a supplier is described to a client, an auditor or a visitor is a statement the business makes about them, usually by somebody improvising in a corridor.
"This is Ana, she runs our reporting" and "This is Ana, she's the consultant who built our reporting" take the same breath and say different things. The second is accurate and nobody minds it; the first is the version that gets said, because it is shorter and avoids an explanation.
What to check on a site you already run
For each supplier regularly on your premises, establish three things: why they are there rather than elsewhere, what safety duties you owe them regardless of the contract, and whether the access they hold still matches the work.
The second of those is the one that has consequences beyond this collection, and it is the one most likely to come back as a surprise.