Does a subcontractor bringing their own crew need a worker-management agreement?

If you’re a general contractor — the head contractor engaging subcontractors and tradies (Australian shorthand for tradespeople: electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and similar) on a build — a subcontractor working solo and a subcontractor who brings their own crew of five onto your site are not the same risk. The moment someone else’s employees are on your project, you’ve got a second layer of workers whose licences, inductions, and supervision your existing paperwork with the subcontractor company doesn’t automatically cover.

Why "we vetted the subcontractor" isn’t the whole story

Most compliance checklists are built around the subcontractor as a single entity — their insurance, their licence, their engagement type. That’s the right check when a subcontractor is one tradie doing the work themselves. It stops being sufficient the moment that subcontractor brings on their own crew of tradies, because now there’s a second employer relationship on your site that your head contract with the subcontractor doesn’t explicitly address unless you’ve put something in writing about it.

A worker-management responsibility agreement exists to close exactly that gap: a signed acknowledgement, specific to that engagement, that the subcontractor bringing extra hands onto site takes responsibility for managing, inducting, and supervising their own crew — rather than that responsibility silently defaulting to whoever happens to notice a problem first.

Who actually needs to answer this question

It’s tempting to have the general contractor guess up front whether a given subcontractor brings their own crew, but in practice they often don’t know — especially for a subcontractor they haven’t engaged before. The subcontractor is the only party who reliably knows their own staffing on a given job, so the more accurate approach is to ask them directly, rather than have the general contractor tick a box based on a guess.

That does introduce a mild conflict of interest — a subcontractor has a small incentive to say "just me" to avoid extra paperwork — but it’s still a better source of truth than a checkbox filled in by someone with no visibility into who’s actually turning up on-site.

What this looks like in practice

In Novato, this is handled as a short, direct question sent to the subcontractor at the point of engagement: do they bring their own tradies, or are they working solo? A "solo" answer is recorded as its own piece of evidence — not just left blank — so the audit trail shows the question was actually asked and answered, not skipped. A "yes" answer immediately shows the worker-management responsibility agreement for them to accept on the spot, and until that acceptance is on file, that engagement shows as non-compliant on your dashboard — the same severity level as a missing licence or an expired insurance certificate, not a separate, easy-to-ignore state.