Most consulting firms prepare a consultant for a client placement in detail. Passes are booked, laptops are set up and the first workshop is already in the diary. The emergency side of the placement gets a line in an induction pack, if it gets anything at all.
Consider a UK management consultancy of around 900 people placing a team of five at a client’s head office in Leeds for a twelve-week programme. Three are employees. Two are associates, independent specialists contracted through the firm. The engagement manager has sorted building passes, desks and guest Wi-Fi, but nobody has asked who runs the client’s evacuation or where its assembly point is.
The questions only surface when the alarm goes off. Which marshal do the consultants report to? Does the client’s roll call include people it thinks of as visitors? Who at the firm needs to know, and how would they find out? Are the two associates anyone’s responsibility at all?
This is where duty of care at client sites stops being a line in a policy and becomes a short set of confirmations. Agreed before day one, they mean the client’s plan and the firm’s plan meet in the middle instead of missing each other.
For a consultant on someone else’s premises, emergency arrangements are either agreed before the placement starts or improvised on the pavement. The improvised version rarely includes everyone.
What Is Duty Of Care At Client Sites?
Duty of care at client sites is a consulting firm’s responsibility for the safety of the people it places on a client’s premises. In practice it means agreeing, before the placement starts, who runs the emergency response on site, how each consultant is told what to do, how they confirm they are safe and who at the firm owns the incident.
The principle behind it is simple. The client controls the building, but the firm doesn’t hand its responsibility over at the reception desk, so each needs to know what the other will do before anything happens.
Why Do Placement Checklists Stop At Passes And Laptops?
Placement checklists stop at passes and laptops because they are written by the people who make a placement work: resourcing, IT and the engagement manager. Each owns a piece of getting a consultant productive on day one. Nobody on that list owns what happens if the building has to be emptied on day nineteen.
The firm’s own emergency plan doesn’t fill the gap. It is usually written around the firm’s offices, with fire wardens, assembly points and a head count for each floor. A consultant who spends four days a week in Leeds appears on the London office’s list while sitting in somebody else’s building.
So the safety questions fall between two documents. The placement checklist assumes the firm’s plan covers them, and the firm’s plan assumes the client’s does.
The Client Runs The Site, The Firm Keeps Its People
When consultants work on a client’s premises, the client runs the site and the consulting firm keeps responsibility for its own people. Neither can hand its part to the other. In Great Britain, health and safety law expects the two employers to exchange information rather than assume.
regulation 12 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a host employer to give the employer of visiting workers comprehensible information about the risks on its premises and the measures it has taken. The host must also give that employer enough information to identify the people nominated to run its evacuation procedures. Where employers share a workplace, regulation 11 requires them to co-operate and co-ordinate the measures they take.
The Health and Safety Executive’s guidance on managing the risks of working alone makes the same point from the firm’s side. When a lone worker will be at someone else’s workplace, the employer must ask that employer about the risks and the control measures in place.
The information usually exists. What is often missing is someone at the firm asking for it and passing it on to the consultant.
Two Sets Of Instructions Should Never Contradict Each Other
A consultant on a client site hears from two organisations during an incident, and the two messages have to agree. The client’s marshals give instructions about the building. The firm gives instructions about work, travel and who to report to. If the firm tells the team to head back to the hotel while the client is still counting heads, the consultant is left to choose between them.
The simplest fix is to divide the subjects in advance:
- the client decides when people leave the building, where they assemble and when they can go back in
- the firm decides whether the team works from elsewhere that afternoon, travels home or stays put
- the firm’s messages never override a marshal’s instruction on site
A first message from the firm, sent once the team is out, might read: “Fire alarm at the client’s Leeds office. Follow the client’s marshals and stay at the assembly point until they release you. Reply SAFE when you are out of the building. Next update from the firm by 12:00.”
Decide How A Consultant Tells The Firm They Are Safe
A consultant should confirm they are safe with one reply to one place, agreed before the placement starts. Without that agreement, the confirmation travels along relationships. The consultant texts the engagement manager, the engagement manager messages the partner and the security team hears last, if at all.
In Leeds, that is exactly what happened. The alarm went at 11:20 on a Thursday in week three. It was a fault and the building was empty for forty minutes, but the firm’s security lead only found out after lunch, from a message the engagement manager forwarded.
A message that has been delivered doesn’t tell anyone a consultant is safe. The firm needs to see who has replied, who hasn’t and who can’t be reached, rather than a chain of texts that only one person has read.
Associates And Subcontractors Often Sit Outside The Groups
Associates and subcontractors are often missing from emergency groups because those groups are built from the HR system, and associates aren’t employees. An associate can work under the firm’s name for months, in the client’s building and on the firm’s engagement, without ever receiving one of the firm’s emergency messages.
The client’s records can miss them too. In Leeds, the marshals checked heads against the visitor log. The two associates had been signed in under the engagement manager’s name on the first morning and never registered separately, so the log showed three people from the firm instead of five.
Accounting for associates in an incident starts with a decision the firm can make today: whether everyone working on its engagements gets its emergency messages, whatever their contract says. If the answer is yes, someone has to add them, keep their details current and remove them when the engagement ends.
Where Should A Consultant's Contact Details Live?
A consultant’s emergency contact details should live in one place the firm can reach at any hour, holding the mobile number they carry and the site they are working from this week. HR records hold a home address and a next of kin. Staffing tools hold the engagement. Neither reliably holds the number an associate uses or the client site where someone is sitting on a Thursday.
The fix is procedural and small. Confirm the mobile number and working location as part of the placement, the same way the pass and the laptop are confirmed, and update both when the placement ends.
Travel belongs in the same check. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office publishes foreign travel advice for each country, with email updates when it changes. Whoever approves a placement abroad should read it before day one.
Challenging The Assumption That The Client's Plan Covers Your Duty Of Care
The client’s emergency plan covers the client’s building. It will get consultants out and count the people it knows about. It won’t tell the consulting firm anything, decide whether the team should work elsewhere or check on the consultant who left for the station ten minutes before the alarm.
The assumption is mostly right about evacuation itself. Consultants should follow the client’s marshals without question. It breaks down on everything around the evacuation: who informs the firm, who gets counted and who looks after the people the client never registered.
The HSE leaflet Protecting lone workers expects employers to have systems in place to keep in touch with lone workers and respond to any incident. It also says emergency procedures should include guidance on how and when lone workers can contact their employer. A consultant placed alone at a client can fit that description, and the client’s fire plan doesn’t meet that expectation on the firm’s behalf.
A Practical Decision Framework: Six Things To Confirm Before A Consultant Goes On Site
Six things are worth confirming before any consultant starts at a client site. Each takes a few minutes, and each is harder to fix once the placement is under way.
1. Who Runs The Emergency Response At The Client
Ask the client for its evacuation procedure, its assembly point and the name of the person who runs it. Pass all three to the consultant before the first morning, not in week two.
2. How The Consultant Tells The Firm They Are Safe
Agree one channel and one reply. A single SAFE in response to a firm-wide alert is worth more than a text to whoever the consultant happens to work with.
3. Who In The Firm Owns The Incident
Name an incident owner and a deputy for the placement, from the firm’s security or business continuity structure. The engagement partner looks after the client relationship rather than running the response.
4. Where The Contact Details Live
Record the mobile number the consultant carries and the site they work from, in the same place the firm will use to send an alert.
5. What The Client Will Say, And What The Firm Will Say
Divide the subjects in advance. The client owns the building, and the firm owns work, travel and reporting.
6. How The Firm Will Account For Everyone, Including Associates
Decide whether associates and subcontractors receive the firm’s alerts. If they do, add them before they start and remove them when they finish.
Run the six against a current placement. If three or more of the answers depend on one person’s memory, the arrangements exist in someone’s head rather than in the firm’s plan.
How Crises Control Supports Emergency Procedures At Client Sites
Crises Control is an Operational Incident Coordination Platform that connects an organisation’s existing systems rather than replacing them. The gap it addresses here is the one the Leeds alarm exposed. Communication tools send notifications, but they don’t coordinate the acknowledgements and updates that follow.
The module most relevant at this stage is Ping, Crises Control’s mass notification software. Ping reaches people through SMS, voice calls, email, push notifications, Microsoft Teams and web alerts, and can target specific groups such as a single site, a department or an on-call rota. Once the arrangements for a client site are agreed, the people on that placement can be set up as a group before day one.
Recipients acknowledge with one tap, and every delivery is timestamped. Ping can be configured to cascade across channels until recipients acknowledge, so a consultant who misses a push notification still gets an SMS or a voice call. Every alert, acknowledgement and escalation is recorded in a communication record that can be exported, which lets the firm answer the client’s questions the next morning with times rather than recollections.
For individuals, the employee safety software page describes the SOS button in the Crises Control app, which lone workers, contractors and mobile staff can use wherever they have a mobile signal. For the wider professional services picture, the page on incident management software for legal services covers coordination across offices, practice areas and time zones.
The software does not decide what the client’s marshals tell people, or whether a team should work elsewhere that afternoon. Those remain decisions for the client and the firm’s incident owner. Its role is to get the firm’s message to everyone on the placement and show who has confirmed.
Confirming Everyone Is Safe Is Where Coordination Starts
A consultant’s reply is the first piece of information the firm needs, not the last. Once everyone on the placement has confirmed, the firm can decide where the team works, what the client hears from the engagement partner and who follows up the person who hasn’t answered.
Those decisions belong to incident coordination. Crises Control’s article on incident coordination for consulting teams picks up from here, covering one named owner, groups built around engagements and a rule for silence. The incident management software page shows how a single alert becomes a managed response, with predefined plans, recipient groups and a timeline of decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does duty of care at client sites mean for a consulting firm?
Duty of care at client sites means a consulting firm stays responsible for the safety of the people it places on a client’s premises, even though the client runs the building. In practice the firm agrees in advance who runs the evacuation, how the consultant confirms they are safe and who at the firm owns the incident. Agreeing those points before day one stops the two organisations’ plans from missing each other.
Who is responsible for a consultant's safety on a client's premises?
Responsibility is shared between the client and the consulting firm. The client runs the site and its emergency procedures, and in Great Britain a host employer must tell a visiting worker’s employer about the risks and who runs its evacuation. The consulting firm stays responsible for its own people, including confirming that they are safe.
What should a consultant do if the client's building is evacuated?
A consultant should follow the client’s marshals, go to the client’s assembly point and stay until released. Once out, the consultant should confirm to the firm that they are safe, using the channel agreed before the placement. Instructions from the firm about work or travel come after the marshals’ instructions, never instead of them.
Should associates and subcontractors receive a firm's emergency alerts?
Associates and subcontractors should receive a firm’s emergency alerts if they work on the firm’s engagements at client sites. Emergency groups built only from the HR system leave them out, so they need adding when they start and removing when they finish. A firm’s arrangements for duty of care at client sites should say who does both.
What should a firm check before a consultant travels abroad for a placement?
A firm should check the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s travel advice for the destination, confirm the consultant’s mobile number and accommodation, and agree how the consultant will confirm they are safe. It should also ask the client for its emergency procedures at the overseas site, as it would in the UK. Signing up for the FCDO’s email updates keeps that check current during the placement.
This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the Crises Control team. Featured image: AI-generated.
