Free site induction form template for subcontractors

A free site induction form template: a one-page record you can fill in at the gate with a subbie who has never been on this job before. Worker details, white card number, emergency contact, a tick list of what you actually covered, and a signature from both of you.

Free, no email required.

Do you have to run one?

Usually, yes. Every state requires you to give workers information, training and instruction about the site's hazards, and a site induction is the tidiest way to do it and the only way that leaves a record. Queensland exempts housing construction work from the formal site-specific induction, but not from that underlying duty. Victoria requires site-specific training on every construction site, housing included. Site induction requirements in Australia sets out each state, with links to the regulator. If you would rather run it on the phone, see the best site induction apps in Australia.

What the form covers

Site details. Project, address, date. Obvious, and constantly left off, which makes the record useless when you find it in a folder two years later.

Worker details. Name, company, trade, mobile, white card number, other licences. The white card number matters: writing it down is what turns "he said he had one" into a record that you asked and he answered.

Emergency contact. Name and phone. Nobody thinks about this until the afternoon they need it, and then it is the only field on the page that matters.

What you covered. Sixteen tick boxes: site rules, hazards, exclusion zones, PPE, amenities, first aid, the emergency procedure and assembly point, how to report an incident, how to raise a concern or stop work. Tick them as you talk. The list is there to stop you forgetting the assembly point for the fourth time this month.

Declaration and two signatures. Theirs and yours. A form signed by only one party is a weaker record than one signed by both.

Do not fill it in at the ute

The form records a conversation, so have the conversation. Filled in on a clipboard at the front of the ute, it becomes an exercise everyone can see through. Carried around the site while you walk the actual hazards, it becomes the thing the subbie remembers at three in the afternoon.

The tick list is ordered so it works that way round, roughly following the walk: what they are here to do, then the site, then the hazards, then what to do when something goes wrong.

How to induct a subcontractor covers the walk itself, including the one question worth asking that is not printed on any form.

The problem with paper inductions

The form works. Keeping the forms is where it falls apart.

You end up with a folder in a shed on one job, a few loose sheets in the ute, and no way to answer "who has been inducted on the Kingsley Street job?" without physically going there and looking. When a head contractor or an insurer asks, that is not a good position to be in.

The same thing without the clipboard

Foreman's site inductions run this same sheet as a QR code at the gate. The worker fills it in and signs on their own phone, so there is no clipboard to lose and no pile to file. There is nothing to install, which is the difference between a subbie doing it and a subbie arguing about it.

You get a live induction register per project: everyone who has been inducted on that site, with the date and their signature, that you can pull up from anywhere.

You can run this on a real job without paying anything, on one project, for as long as you like.

Related

If you are chasing site records more generally, start with the free site diary template.

To write the site-specific part of the induction, the free site induction checklist builder covers the six areas in the Code of Practice. If you run your induction online, the QR site sign maker turns the link into a sign for the gate.