Pre-onboarding for the safe reception of external plant operators

Every week, temporary workers, subcontractors, service providers and visitors arrive at your industrial site. For each of them, the same half-hour safety welcome has to be repeated face-to-face, for someone who may be leaving in three days' time. Pre-onboarding reverses this logic: the security reception of your external stakeholders takes place remotely, before they enter the portal. Mercateam introduces this feature so that your outsourcers arrive already trained, certificate in hand, ready to work from the first minute.

Discover Mercateam's pre-ondoarding video

Safety reception for externals, a face-to-face event repeated dozens of times a week in the factory

Every week, a production site receives dozens of visitors from outside its workforce. Each one goes through the same safety reception, often led by a manager who leaves his or her desk to explain the instructions, the traffic plan and the mandatory PPE. Multiply this by the number of arrivals: the half-hour unit becomes several hours per week, taken from the time of your HR, QHSE and production teams. As the number of arrivals increases, the temptation to cut corners looms, and the welcome is shortened, instructions are given orally without a trace, and clearance checks are postponed until the following day. In the end, content varies according to who's doing the greeting, and so does quality. And on the day of an audit, reconstructing proof that each external employee has been properly trained is a headache when everything is based on paper sign-in sheets. On the sites we support, this is one of the first frictions QHSE managers describe to us, and it culminates at the most tense moments: the seasonal peak in the food industry, when waves of temporary workers arrive in a matter of days, or the preparation of a NADCAP audit in the aeronautics industry, where a missing piece of evidence is paid for dearly.

What the French Labor Code requires for the safe reception of external workers in industrial environments

This requirement for proof stems directly from the French Labor Code. Articles L.4141-1 and L.4141-2 require safety training for all new arrivals, and the principle of equal treatment applies to temporary workers and permanent employees alike. In the case of a temporary assignment, it is the user company, i.e. you, who remains responsible for the conditions of performance and safety throughout the duration of the assignment (article L.1251-21). This obligation applies to everyone:

• temporary workers sent by a temporary employment agency,
• subcontractors for maintenance or industrial cleaning,
• technical service providers who intervene on an ad hoc basis,
• visitors, auditors and suppliers.

Beyond the legal framework, it's people's real safety that's at stake here. In 2024, Health Insurance recorded 549,614 accidents at work, or 26.4 per 1,000 employees, and temporary workers have a frequency index well above the average, because they combine exposed positions, rapid induction and co-activity with your teams. Traceability then becomes decisive, because in the event of an inspection, you need to prove that the induction took place and that it was understood, not just asserted. Finally, this induction must be coordinated with the prevention plan, which governs the risks of interference between your activity and that of external companies, and with the authorization management (electrical, CACES, fire permit) expected on site.

What pre-onboarding is and what it means for factory safety reception

Pre-onboarding is the key to meeting this obligation, without overwhelming your teams. Pre-onboarding consists of providing remote training before the worker arrives, rather than concentrating everything on site on D-day. The person receives their safety induction course on their phone, follows it whenever they want, and shows up already trained. No account to create, no application to install, no need for a professional e-mail address: an outsider has direct access to the content, which removes the obstacle we see in getting the most people to drop out, because a temporary worker summoned for five days doesn't create an account or download an application to follow a training course. There's a limit to what pre-onboarding can achieve: it covers general safety induction, i.e. site rules, instructions and how to behave. It does not replace consideration of the risks specific to the workstation and the co-activity, which is verified in the field on the day of the intervention. What it does do is take the repeatable part out of reception, and reserve face-to-face time for what really needs to be done on site.

Create and share a safety journey in just a few minutes

From the manager's point of view, everything is controlled from the dedicated pre-onboarding platform: it takes just a few minutes to create a complete itinerary, which can then be shared via the channel of your choice.

A journey through text, images, videos and validation quizzes

An HR, QHSE or production manager assembles the course from his or her own materials: text for instructions, images for the traffic plan, videos for high-risk gestures, and a quiz to check that the content has been understood, not just scrolled through. You retain control over this content and adjust it according to the site or type of intervention, without having to start from scratch each time.

Share by SMS, link or QR code

There are three ways to transmit the quiz: an SMS sent to the person's phone, a link sent by email, or a QR code displayed on the site's home page. The participant scans or clicks, follows the content, validates his or her quiz, and immediately receives his or her certificate of achievement on his or her phone. When they arrive at the portal, their general training has already been validated and tracked, and the on-site reception staff concentrate on their job.

Automatic translation of content into over 50 languages

On an industrial site, your service providers don't all speak the same language, and a half-understood security welcome doesn't protect anyone. Mercateam automatically translates your content into over 50 languages, and not just text: video audio too. An operator seconded from abroad therefore follows exactly the same route as the others, in his own language, and validates the same quiz. Your welcome remains consistent whatever the language spoken at the entrance to the site, without you having to produce and maintain a version for each nationality.

The subcontractor portal for delegating registration to temporary employment agencies

Temporary employment agencies are less and less physically present on site, which makes it difficult to keep track of the people they send. The subcontractor portal addresses this very issue: you allocate a dedicated link to each agency, and the agency itself registers its temps in the reception process. You retain control over the content of the security welcome, without having to manage the registration process on a person-by-person basis. The administrative burden is shifted back to the staffing provider, and on your side, the interim management is limited to checking that everyone has validated their route before arriving.

Real-time monitoring of safety checks carried out prior to site entry

A dashboard shows you, in real time, who has taken the course, how long it took, who has validated the quiz and who is therefore ready to go on site. Scattered attendance sheets and paper binders disappear in favor of a dated, usable history. On the day of an audit, the proof is already in place: each validated course is time-stamped, the quiz score is recorded, and the certificate is archived. This follow-up extends the logic of a training follow-up centralized, where every security reception carried out feeds directly into the site's compliance file. And since this file contains personal data of stakeholders, it remains hosted in Europe, on an ISO 27001 and SOC2 Type 2 certified platform, compliant with the RGPD.

What pre-onboarding means for your teams and your audits

By moving the security reception to the pre-arrival stage, pre-onboarding acts on four points for your site:

• your HR, QHSE and production teams get back the hours they spend redoing the same reception; ;
• the quality of the welcome becomes homogeneous, whatever the person receiving it; ;
• your compliance is tracked and ready for audit, including in multiple languages; ;
• your external contributors arrive operational from the very first minute.

Since 2019, we've been equipping over 300 industrial sites, and one observation is repeated everywhere: what happens in the first few minutes of an extern on site engages his or her safety for the entire duration of the mission. Putting people back at the heart of Industry 4.0 starts here, by bringing in every person who has already been trained. Pre-onboarding adds to our QHSE software to cover the reception of external customers, from the first SMS to the certificate. See it in action on a site similar to yours, request a demo.