rm Engineering - Safety Questionnaires Agreement...

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LTB 911/11 - Royal Mail Engineering - Safety Questionnaires Agreement, Joint Statement & Briefing:

No. 911 /11
Ref RM1
Date: 28 October 2011





To: All Branches,






Dear Colleagues,







Royal Mail Engineering - Safety Questionnaires Agreement, Joint Statement & Briefing:






As part of a Royal Mail/CWU joint initiative and our joint commitment to improve safety in the workplace, the engineering health and safety team along with the CWU Health, Safety & Environment Department and our Engineering ASRs have jointly developed a series of on-line Health and Safety questionnaires for deployment across engineering maintenance.





The surveys being carried out in RM Engineering are seen as a good source of information about the Safety Culture and Safety knowledge amongst Engineering members. Questionnaires if effectively used can provide a range of benefits to improve Health and safety knowledge and compliance in the workplace. The questionnaires will support the Individual Training Needs Analysis exercise.

A trial will initially be deployed in November in the Anglia and South East Regions and results will be jointly reviewed before any decision is made as to a wider roll out to maintenance engineers nationally.
· The first objective is to better understand the status of the safety culture.
· Secondly, to clearly identify what’s required to improve and sustain it.






This means understanding people’s knowledge, perception, and attitude to health and safety. All returned questionnaires will be jointly analysed and can better inform future decisions and how we deploy efforts and resources.







To improve response rates, the approach will be to gather information on an ongoing basis by using only short questionnaires with a small number of questions which takes only a few minutes to complete at any one time, with further on-line
questionnaires issued on a regular basis. Future questionnaires may relate to recently deployed safety standards and procedures. Again these will be designed to only take minutes to complete.





This approach will only work if returns are in sufficient numbers and completed on time. Otherwise any purposeful analysis and well informed follow up action won’t be possible. Engineers are therefore jointly urged to complete the questionnaires
in the given time-scale. On receipt of the questionnaire it will need to be completed within 3 days.
The questionnaire returns are confidential so no one can be identified and members will not be notified of any individual results. The primary objective is to gain a better understanding of safety culture status in engineering maintenance and to secondly identify clearly what is required to improve it through the analysis provided by the RM Engineering/CWU Health & Safety Joint Working Group.

The survey has been produced and will be carried out by Royal Mail's Engineering National Safety Team in consultation with the CWU.

1. This initiative will be carried out with the full involvement and support of the CWU Nationally and Locally. Employees are encouraged to participate fully.
2. This initiative is intended to be as supportive as possible for Royal Mail Engineering employees. There is absolutely no intention by Royal Mail to use this survey or the remedial action in any punitive way and it will be delivered in a 'Blame-Free' culture.
3. Survey results will be shared with the CWU in order to discuss and determine joint improvements in whatever area it is felt necessary so as to improve safety standards on site and reduce accidents.
4. None of Royal Mail's procedures, policies or agreements are altered by this initiative.
5. Royal Mail will seek to improve which ever health and safety shortcomings are identified with the support of the CWU.
6. Any improvements will be delivered in a supportive not punitive manner.
7. The initiative is designed to help prevent and avoid accidents and injuries. This is not about liability. The programme's aim is not about finding people culpable but in essence about promoting and encouraging safe working methods and
thus reducing accidents, working in collaboration with the CWU.
8. The overall objective is to make workplaces healthier and safer, improve performance and raise safety standards through trust, respect, co-operation and joint problem solving.




All RM Engineering CWU Members and Representatives are urged to fully support and participate in completing the survey questionnaires.

Yours Sincerely
Dave Joyce
CWU National Health, Safety & Environment Officer