Day to day

13. Channels, tone and privacy

The right channel for the right content

• Email or platform: Formal and complete information: mobilisation letters, plan changes, confirmations. Anything that has to be findable again.
• SMS or push notification: Time-critical reminders and short alerts that point to the full information in the main channel. Never the only channel for something important.
• Telephone: Big changes, sensitive matters, an inability to travel, and all first contact at short notice. Always followed by written confirmation.

Tone

Write short, concrete and without unnecessary formality, but never at the cost of precision. Write dates unambiguously with the weekday ("Thursday 16 July"), and times with the clock and the place. Avoid internal abbreviations the employee may not know. Always be explicit about status: possible, intended or confirmed.

Privacy

Coordinators handle sensitive personal information every day. Ground rules:

• Health information, the reason for sickness absence and other sensitive details should never be sent by SMS, in open messaging channels or to more recipients than necessary.
• Never share one employee's information with other employees, not even indirectly ("NN is ill, can you take his trip" is enough; the diagnosis is irrelevant).
• Follow the organisation's routines for storage and deletion. Certificates, helseattester, next-of-kin data and personnel documentation belong in systems with access control, not in private inboxes.
• When sharing personal data with clients, operators' systems or agents abroad: share only what the purpose requires, and make sure the legal basis and the agreements are in place in line with the organisation's privacy routines.

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14. Pay, hours and trust

Everything good coordination builds through a trip can be torn down by one thing: an error on the payslip afterwards. For personnel with variable supplements, offshore allowances, overtime and compensation for extensions, pay is derived directly from what the coordinator has recorded and agreed. The coordinator is therefore part of the payroll chain, whether or not it says so in the job description:

• Everything agreed in writing has to reach payroll. Extensions, cancellation compensation, changed shifts and extraordinary agreements are documented not only for the archive; they have to enter the basis for the payroll run. An agreement that exists only in an email thread becomes a payroll error.
• A clear routine for hours and expense claims at demobilisation: the deadline, the channel and who approves, including any approval in the client's systems (see 6.5). Chase before the deadline, not after the payroll run.
• Answer pay questions quickly and traceably. The coordinator is often the first point of contact for questions about pay after a trip. Answer with a reference to the documentation (mobilisation letter, extension confirmation, timesheets), and escalate to payroll or HR with full context rather than sending the employee onward alone.
• Correct errors visibly. When something does go wrong: acknowledge it, say when it will be corrected, and confirm when it has been. An error corrected quickly and cleanly can actually strengthen trust. An error that has to be chased three times does lasting damage.

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15. Documentation and inspection: what has to be producible

Principle 2.5 says everything should be in writing and traceable. This chapter is about the other side of the same matter: what is required to be documented, who can demand to see it, and what "produced" actually means in practice. A coordinator can document diligently and still fail an inspection, because the documentation is spread across inboxes and old spreadsheet versions, or because the system can only show the current status and not how things looked at a given point in time.

This chapter is an overview of where the requirements come from, not an exhaustive list. The caveat from About this guide applies here in particular: verify against current regulations, your own collective agreement and legal counsel where relevant.

15.1 Who can demand to see documentation

• Havindustritilsynet (Havtil, the Norwegian Ocean Industry Authority) supervises offshore petroleum activity and certain onshore plants. Its inspections target the management system: can the company show that personnel were qualified, that working hours and oppholdsperioder (continuous stays offshore) were within the requirements, and that deviations were handled?
• Arbeidstilsynet (the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority) supervises land-based activity, including workshops and bases, and hire-in and staffing arrangements. Classic themes are working-time records, overtime, employment contracts and equal treatment of hired-in workers.
• The tax authorities and auditors require the payroll basis: timesheets, approvals, variable supplements and expense claims.
• Datatilsynet (the Norwegian Data Protection Authority) may inspect the processing of personal data: the record of processing activities, the legal basis, data processing agreements and deletion routines.
• Clients. Contractual audits by operators and main contractors are in practice the most frequent scrutiny a service company meets, and they ask for much of the same: competence records, working hours, HSE documentation. Treat client audits as seriously as regulatory inspections; the result affects contracts directly.
• Your own employees and tillitsvalgte (employee representatives). Arbeidsmiljøloven (the Working Environment Act) gives employee representatives access to the working-time record. The individual has access to information about themselves under the privacy rules. In a dispute about pay or extensions, the documentation is the evidence.

15.2 The documentation categories the coordinator owns or feeds

Working hours, rest and oppholdsperioder. Arbeidsmiljøloven requires that a record exists of how much each employee has worked, available to Arbeidstilsynet and to employee representatives. The Act does not say how long the record has to be kept. That requirement comes from elsewhere: an inspection or a client audit asks backwards in time, and the payroll basis has a retention period of its own. In practice you therefore need a complete history of continuous stays, shifts, overtime and rest per person, plus a documented basis for any extension or extraordinary arrangement (agreement, discussion or consent, and any dispensation). The plan alone is not enough; it is the hours actually worked that have to be producible.

Competence, certificates and helseattest, with history. The inspection question is rarely "is NN qualified today?"; it is "was NN qualified when they did the job on 14 March last year?". The system therefore has to answer for the status at a given point in time: which certificates were valid, what the expiry dates were, and who checked it at mobilisation. For the helseattest, store validity and expiry, not medical content.

Personnel movements and POB history. Who was where, when, with a complete audit trail (see 11.1). This is the documentation in incidents and investigations, and the basis for offshore days in pay and tax terms among other things.

Agreements and decisions. Mobilisation letters with every version, confirmations from employees, extension agreements with consent, standby and availability agreements, agreements on compensation for cancellation. Everything chapter 2.5 says should be put in writing should also be findable together per person and per assignment, not reconstructed from email threads.

Payroll basis. Timesheets, approvals and vouchers are accounting documentation with a statutory retention period (the general rule in bokføringsloven, the Bookkeeping Act, is five years). The coordinator's part of the chain (chapter 14) is part of that basis.

Work abroad. For work in EEA countries: the A1 certificate documenting which country's social security scheme applies, a recurring checkpoint in audits of international work. Otherwise: work permits, visas and other documentation that the work was lawful, retained after the assignment has ended as well.

Hiring in and hiring out personnel, where relevant: registration as a staffing undertaking and documentation of equal treatment.

Privacy. The GDPR requires documentation of the processing itself: a record of processing activities, data processing agreements with system suppliers and with the parties personal data is shared with (operator systems, agents abroad), and defined deletion routines. The exemption for organisations with fewer than 250 employees does not help here, because personnel data is processed continuously rather than occasionally. Note the tension: some requirements impose long retention, while the privacy principles require deletion once the purpose is fulfilled. The answer is an explicit retention matrix per document type, with the legal basis and the deletion deadline, rather than a general "we keep everything" practice.

15.3 What "inspection-ready" means in practice

Four properties separate documentation that passes scrutiny from documentation that merely exists:

1. History, not only current status. Being able to show the state at any point in the past, for working hours, certificates, POB and agreements.
2. Producible in days, not weeks. Inspections and audits work to short deadlines. Test it the same way as the emergency drill in 11.5: can we produce complete documentation for one person and one assignment from last year, within a day?
3. Traceable and tamper-evident. Who recorded and changed what, and when. A timesheet that can be edited without a trace is weak documentation.
4. One source. The same question should give the same answer whoever asks and whoever answers. Two systems each holding their own version of the working-time history is worse than one with gaps, because then the company has to explain the discrepancy.

15.4 Make it routine, not a scramble

• Take documentation requirements into the requirements matrix per client (chapters 4.1 and 6.6): what documentation are we contractually obliged to produce, in what format, how quickly.
• Run an annual self-check: pull a random assignment from last year and try to produce the complete documentation pack (requirements check, mobilisation letter with versions, confirmations, working hours, payroll basis). The gaps that surface are the inspection findings you did not have to receive.
• Where a requirement is breached (an exceeded oppholdsperiode, a mobilisation with shortcomings): document the deviation, the cause and the action at the time it happens. An acknowledged and handled deviation is a normal part of a management system; an undocumented deviation uncovered by someone else is a finding.

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16. Welfare and a sustainable load

Controlling working hours and rest (chapter 3.5) is the minimum. A coordinator who wants to keep people over time also watches the load that is lawful but unhealthy:

• See the patterns in the data. Frequent extensions on the same person, repeated short-notice trips falling to the same "yes people", time off steadily eaten by courses and travel. No rule is broken, but the person is used up. Distribute the load actively, and use the overview to catch imbalances before they turn into resignations.
• Take the pulse regularly. A short, genuine conversation at demobilisation or during time off ("how have the trips been lately, is the plan working for you?") picks up more than an annual survey. After particularly demanding trips or incidents on board, follow-up should be routine rather than chance.
• Know the signals, do not diagnose. A changed pattern of replies, a shorter fuse, rising short absences. The coordinator's job is not to assess health but to see the person, ask, and point the way to support (line manager, HR, occupational health, any assistance scheme). The threshold for mentioning that help exists should be low.
• Transparency is welfare too. Much of the strain in offshore work comes not from the trips but from the unpredictability between them. Everything this guide says about early notice, clear status and respect for time off is in practice the most important welfare measure a coordinator controls.