Veriforce Canada wins 2026 Readers' Choice Award for 11th year

00:00
But the real value comes when you take all that information and actually use it to make better operational decisions.   Hello and welcome to another episode of COS TV. I'm your host Shane Mercer, senior editor of Canadian Occupational Safety. And with me today is Henriette Bichai, president of Veriforce Canada. Thanks for joining me, Henriette, and congratulations on being recognized with a 2026 Canadian Occupational Safety Reader Choice Award. Thank you so much.   It's a distinction determined by safety

00:34
professionals across Canada. What does achieving this recognition mean for Vera Force Canada and how does it reflect the work of your team when it comes to helping organizations create safer workplaces?   Shane, it means a lot to us mainly because of where it comes from. This is the safety community in Canada telling us that they continue to see value in what we do. 11 years in a row is a significant achievement for us receiving this award because it's not just earned just one time. That kind of trust, you

01:07
need to keep earning it. We've been serving Canadians for more than 50 years and today we have over 300 people across Canada, 1,400 globally supporting our customers and contractors every day. What I'm most proud of is the consistency of our team. We understand the Canadian market. We understand the industries we serve and we've continued to evolve with our customers. We also have the advantage today of being part of a larger global organization while still bringing strong Canadian expertise

01:35
to the market. So for me, the recognition really belongs to our people. At the end of the day, the measure that matters most is are we helping our customers create safer workplaces, helping more workers go home safely? That's what keeps us focused here. And so we're very grateful to the community for this award   11 years in a row. You certainly are earning that trust year after year. Uh uh well done. Um a theme throughout Vera Force Canada's story is the shift from administrative compliance to a more

02:11
connected data-driven approach to workforce risk management. How has this evolution changed the way your clients think about safety? and what lessons have you learned from helping clients move towards a more proactive safety culture?   Yeah, it's a really good question. That conversation has shifted and changed quite a bit. Um, if you think back years ago, a lot of the focus was simply um are we compliant? Do we have the documentation? Did we check the box? Lots of paperwork, lots of

02:41
administration. And truthfully, that is no longer enough. Our customers today want to know where is the risk, where are the gaps, who is actually ready to work and what could we do to do together before something happens. So that's a very important shift. Compliance is still the foundation obviously making sure that truly everything that they are submitting is in fact real. But the real value comes when you take all that information and actually use it to make better operational decisions. One of the

03:15
things we've learned is that visibility changes the way organizations operate. When you can see clearly that contractors are ready, trained, qualified, or missing requirements, you can intervene early. You're not finding out of the gate or even worse after something's happened. I'll give you a good example. Riotinto Setil. They're an excellent partner of ours and they have just over 400 contractors moving through their operations with significant turnover every year. By digitizing part

03:44
of the process, something like a permit authorization that could have taken hours or sometimes half a day came down to about 10 minutes. They reported that they estimate that the savings that they have had is about $5 million. That's a great efficiency story. But to me the bigger story is that people have better decision making power. And another important lesson I would say is technology itself doesn't create strong safety culture. You need leadership. You need accountability. You need people who

04:15
care. And if you take um a tour into any one of our four offices across Canada and you hear of any incident that has gone on at our partners or beyond, you'll see a bunch of people stand up and be like, "This is happening. Somebody needs to adjust. We have leadership, we have accountability, and we have people who truly care. The technology gives you the visibility to act, but the people behind the technology is what really drives um the efficiencies, the power, and the culture. So, we move from paperwork to

04:46
prevent.   Helping a client save $5 million is certainly something to be proud of. Uh really well done there. How does Vera Force Canada balance the diverse needs of employers, contractors, and safety professionals while maintaining those high standards of compliance, visibility, and workforce readiness?   Another really good question, Shane. Um, okay. So, let's think about it this way. There's the hiring organizations. They want confidence. They want to know the contractors are coming onto their

05:18
sites and meeting their standards. They want to know the risks that they're taking and making the decision whether to take them or not. And they want that visibility in real time. Then you have the contractors. They want clarity. They want ease of use. They want us to tell them how to do it, where to do it. It's got to be intuitive, and they want people to help them work through it. Then you've got the safety professionals, and they need information that is real and that they can trust.

05:45
Our role is to bring all those together, those three important stakeholders together. We've successfully been able to do that. We have more than 500 hiring clients just in Canada with over 3 30,000 contractors in our Canadian network. So, we get a good view of what works and where the friction actually is. We built our solution for our hiring clients, our contractors, and the core of our business, which is safety, is run by our HSC teams and our CRSPs. One of the biggest issues contractors tell us about

06:20
is the inconsistency. Every customer, every partner, every hiring client has a different process, different requirements, different systems. Nobody is saying that we should lower the safety standards, but there are commonalities, provincial legislations. um think about whether you're a particular uh risk class or you're a particular trade. There are some commonalities that we are able to combine. The question is how do we have the highest standards and make it easy to manage. So we've been able to do that

06:49
through our operational processes through our unique products all while giving the customization. These standardizations these good technologies these strong support mechanisms make a really big difference to our contractors. They complete the questionnaire, sometimes once with additional questions for um a particular hiring client. They have the support they need. They have a product that's intuitive. They have somebody on the other side of the phone. They have a health and safety expert to help them

07:15
through the process as well. And think of our human expertise is just as important as our technology. So both are required. Technology gives scale but our safety professionals bring judgment, context and the knowledge of the industry and the regulations that is absolutely required to have people trained, ready and bring them home safe. You need both   extremely complex. Uh what challenges are your clients facing and how is Veriforce Canada helping them navigate those challenges?   There's a lot happening um always at the

07:49
same time. Okay. Our customers are dealing with workforce uh shortage also in terms of successor um transfer of knowledge learning. They're relying heavily on contractors. More and more companies are required to do more with less. So they hire contractors to manage es and flows of their business. Operations are becoming more complex. Regulations continue to evolve and the same time expectations around safety and accountability continue to increase. So I don't think the issue today is

08:20
simply can I comply. The issue has to be and has to be thought of as can I stay operationally ready while managing all of this complexity. Think about a large organization operating across multiple sites. You may have thousands of workers, different contractors, different skills, different trades, different qualifications, training requirements, certifications, provincial requirements. All of that information changes constantly. You cannot manage the efficiency through a spreadsheet, emails or manual processes anymore,

08:51
at least not efficiently. The other things that has changed is that who cares about information? Many many people care about the information. It's not only the safety team anymore. You're talking about operations, you're talking about procurement, you're talking about executives. Many people are looking at the data now because contractor risk affects safety, but it also affects productivity. It affects schedules. It affects reputations. It affects the business community. So these ripple

09:18
effects that safety have not only on the health of an individual and the impact to his community and the impact to his family but also then expands to his colleagues, it may shut down operations. So we are our focus is helping customers simplify that complexity, give them better visibility. We take on that accountability responsibility within our teams, within our human teams. standardize where it makes sense. Help them know who is ready to work before people arrive at their site. And we do that quickly. We want the customer

09:51
spending less time chasing information and more time managing the actual risk on their site.   So where do we go from here, Henriette? Uh what opportunities do you see for Vera Force Canada to elevate workplace safety? And how do you hope this recognition will advance your broader mission of ensuring more workers return home safely every day?   I'll say it again. Thank you again to the entire community for this recognition and again the award goes 100% to the team behind the technology.

10:23
But that said, I think the biggest opportunity is connecting the entire network, the workforce network's risk journey. Think about this. Historically, the industry has managed things in separate pieces. contractor qualifications in one training somewhere else worker onboarding somewhere else employee information somewhere else connecting those has become increasingly critical our technology can absolutely do that and our people understand its value but the customers doesn't always experience risk in separate pieces right

10:54
so when I have to be uh qualified I know that I need a training to complete that qualification they're interconnected they need one clear picture of that workforce uh readiness. So that's what we can offer. The combination of comply works and safe contractor under the Veriforce Canada brand has given us that ability to bridge all of that together. The learning, the qualification, the workforce, the site access. So that is where we are moving and continuing to move. We have the ability, the unique

11:27
ability to operate at the worker level. Not only can a hiring client know the operating company that comes on their site exactly what's going on in real time, but they also know who they've subcontracted. They know the employee on site. They also know the task that they're going to perform. They can measure that. They can time stamp that. And it can all be connected to the gate. That entire journey, and I've said this before in one of our previous interviews, is something you can take in

11:54
pieces. The journey, the compliance journey isn't something you leaprog right into. It's 100% although we all want that. What it is, it's a continuous journey, one step at a time. And we are here to take all of our clients on that journey with us. One of the things that also is really important for us um here at Veriforce Canada is that we are absolutely embracing the role of AI. I've talked a lot about our people. I've talked a lot about our expertise. I've talked also about how technology helps us scale but

12:25
so will AI. AI plays an integral role in accelerating us. It doesn't play a role in replacing us. The critical judgment of our safety team remains. Our critical assessment remains. Our product knowledge remains. But we will be integrating AI to make sure that our technology continues to scale and continues to serve the Canadian market.   Henriette Bichai, president of Vera Force Canada. Thanks for joining me.   It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.   And thank you all for tuning in to

12:57
another episode of COS TV. Stay up to speed on the latest news and trends in safety by regularly checking in on us at the safety.com. I'm your host Shane Mercer. Till next time, stay safe. [music]