More and more organisations value a strong safety and health culture. The Safety Culture Ladder (SCL) helps companies demonstrate this. Whereas the SCL is already widely used in the construction, infra, energy and rail sectors, temping and secondment agencies can now also get certified. This means they can demonstrate to clients that safety, health and careful onboarding are structurally embedded in their working methods.
Why is SCL certification valuable for staffing and secondment agencies?
- Increased client confidence through a demonstrably strong safety and health culture.
- Better competitiveness in tenders and long-term collaborations.
- Strengthen internal organisation through structured focus on safety. health and onboarding.
To make audits for staffing and secondment agencies unambiguous and fair, the Committee of Experts (CoE) has decided how to determine the number of audit days (man-days). This takes into account the unique personnel structure:
- For temporary employment agencies, both office staff and the number of active temporary workers are included in the audit.
- For secondment agencies, both office staff and the number of employees actually employed count.
- Interviews with agency staff and secondees take place at the agency's offices.
- The onboarding of flexible employees is reviewed during the audit to ensure they are well prepared to start work.
The new guidelines will apply from 1 July 2025.
Transitional regulation
For ongoing audit engagements, a transitional arrangement applies. To apply the certification fairly and effectively, the Committee of Experts established how audits for temporary employment and secondment agencies will be set up. This takes into account the specific personnel structure of these agencies.
For the scope of the audit (the number of man-days), the size of the organisation (in number of FTEs) is the starting point here. And that is different for a temporary employment agency than for an 'ordinary' organisation. Temporary employment agencies have a large number of agency staff in addition to office staff.
To ensure uniformity in determining the number of man-days, the SCL's Committee of Experts (CoE) has therefore taken the following decision;
To determine the number of man-days for an audit at an employment agency/detachment agency, the following assumptions should be used (this takes into account the difference between an employment agency and a detachment agency (essentially, the difference is in the type of contract temporary workers/detachments receive));
- At an employment agency:
Both the office staff and the number of employees working for the agency at the time of the audit (which may therefore be a different number from the number of employees registered with the agency) should be included when determining the number of man-days for the audit. - At a secondment agency:
Both office staff and the number of staff employed by the secondment agency at the time of the audit (which may therefore be a different number from the number of staff actually seconded) should be included when determining the number of man-days for the audit.
Following that, the following conditions are set;
- The number of employees to be interviewed at a temporary employment agency must be representative of the 'normal' picture (during a calendar year) of the temporary employment agency. The CB must check this prior to the audit.
- Interviews with temporary workers/detached workers should take place at the office of the temporary employment agency/detached agency (and therefore not at the location where they are working at the time of the audit).
- The temporary employment agency/detachment agency is responsible for the staff they deploy/detach. They have to 'onboard' the staff they sign up/employ with them at the client's level.
An audit should check, through a series of interviews:
- Whether and how this 'onboarding' was done by the employment agency/delegation agency;
- Whether employees have understood the essence of 'onboarding' and can indicate what this means in practice with regard to their work.
This also applies to temporary workers/detached workers deployed/detached in managerial positions.
- How what was learned during 'onboarding' is also maintained over time.
The effective date of this decision is 1 July 2025.
In case the CB already has an order from a temporary employment agency or secondment agency to perform an audit on the SCL, whereby different starting points have been used than those now decided by the CB, a so-called 'repair job' will have to be performed during the follow-up audit in year 2. In year 2, audits will then have to be carried out according to the decision taken.