This month sees the launch of a new toolkit of guidance designed to improve workforce safety in the offshore oil and gas industry. The new Workforce Engagement Toolkit has been developed by Step Change in Safety – an industry-based organisation dedicated to improving UK offshore safety through collaboration of best practices. The Step Change in Safety Workforce Engagement Steering Group has been working to establish the guidance for a number of years with the aims of enhancing a 'culture of safety' at worksites.

The Workforce Engagement Toolkit is a document which provides practical guidance to companies to help encourage and improve engagement amongst all members of the workforce in an effort to enhance their safety culture. It aims to do so by helping companies identify areas in need of improvement and providing guidance on how that improvement can be facilitated.

Central to this is the worksite survey, which allows employees the opportunity to contribute their views on how engaged they feel in workforce safety issues. The survey is confidential and is submitted directly to Step Change in Safety. The organisation then formulates a response to the company in the form of a worksite summary report.

The survey is made up of a number of questions which will help to identify how visible company leaders are, how the attitudes of those leaders are perceived by individual workers and to what extent those individuals feel encouraged to participate in safety. It is hoped that the results of the survey will assist leaders in identifying strengths and weaknesses within particular worksites and therefore assist with the development of plans for improvement. Further to this, it is intended that the results can be used by a company as a benchmark to gauge performance both over a period of time and across the industry generally. 

It is hoped that employees will be encouraged to engage fully in the development of worksite safety practices. Step Change in Safety note that there is "clear evidence that a fully engaged workforce is a crucial driver of continuous improvement."

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The original publication date for this article was 06/09/2012.