Employer Toolkit

As an employer, it is important that you effectively engage with your workers every day. Worker engagement is based on trust and integrity and is a shared commitment between you and your workers. It is a valuable tool that promotes workplace unity and can greatly contribute to worker performance and productivity by increasing worker morale.

You should plan ways to engage with your workers to support their involvement in health and safety matters. Engagement is likely to work well when you have a mix of formal and informal ways for workers to participate.

For an engagement strategy to be successful, you should always include workers views and opinions when engaging with them on any topic and have concise, effective and ongoing open channels for workers to suggest improvements or raise concerns.

When engaging on road safety, it can lead to a safer workplace for all.

As an employer, manager or WHS leader, you are responsible for effectively engaging your workers on critical safety aspects in the workplace. While this may be a challenging task, we have provided some helpful ideas and suggestions that you can use to educate, engage and inform your workers.

Try some of these:

• One-on-one or group conversations with your workers, talk to them about road safety and educate them about their responsibilities.
• Include your Road Safety Policy in your induction program; this will demonstrate the importance of road safety to new workers from day one.
• Adapt the fact sheets and FAQs provided in this toolkit.
• Regularly educate your workers with tips, facts and knowledge through your internal communications such as meetings, toolbox talks, newsletters and intranet. Continual education helps reinforce knowledge retention and behaviour change.
• Invite a local Road Safety Ambassador or Council Road Safety Officer to give a talk and discussion in your workplace. Fill out the contact us form for more information.
• Give small, frequent and succinct toolbox talks on one road safety topic at a time. There are over 20 toolbox talks available for you to download.
• Have a BBQ and discuss a road safety topic; invite discussion from the group to share their stories around road trauma. You may be surprised at the number of people who have experienced some sort of trauma.
• Consider holding a workshop with your workers to help develop or refine a policy. Worker contribution in the development of policies and guidelines assists in worker commitment and engagement.
• Creating a video is a great idea to engage a number of workers. Check out the Western NSW Local Health District video for inspiration.
• Implement a “safer driver rewards program” to encourage safe driving amongst your workers by rewarding them for no infringements or crashes.
• Use the toolkit resources in your workplace to reinforce messages about road safety, such as:
  • Planning the drive poster placed around your worksites and offices to encourage workers to read and review the content necessary to safely plan a trip.
  • Include a pre-drive checklist in each of your vehicles as one final safety check and engagement tool before your workers head out on the road.
  • Consider placing the Drive Safe Swatch in each of your vehicles to provide information on common road rules, safety practices and information on what to do in the event of a crash.. Also include information on roadside assistance and other workplace driving guidelines.