Contacting and Recruiting Organisations
If you are running the workshop in external companies, for example as a road safety officer running the workshop for local organisations, then contacting and recruiting organisations is the initial step.
We used several different methods to recruit organisations for the pilot workshops.
A press release offering training to organisations was issued. A full transcript of the press release can be found here.
Secondly, information about the workshop was included in established external communication channels to employers. RoSPA's Safety Connections included a short article about the workshops.
Finally, a more opportunistic reactive method of offering the training was used, by offering the workshop to employers who contacted RoSPA for other reasons.
12 pilot workshops were delivered. 11 of the workshops were made up of young drivers from the same company, and as four organisations arranged morning and afternoon sessions for different groups of their young drivers, these workshops took place in a total of seven companies.
Four of the seven organisations were SMEs, with offices around the country and these were the same four organisations who arranged morning and afternoon workshops because of the large numbers of young drivers they employ. In these organisations the participants were made up of young drivers from several different locations who would not necessarily know each other. There was also a range of reasons that younger drivers would drive for work in these groups - ranging from trainee managers and sales staff who would drive long distances on motorways for meetings, to apprentices who would be involved in deliveries, or undertake journeys to a site where their skills were required. The location of the longer trips could differ widely within the groups too, with some being asked to drive to city centres and others being asked to drive to remote rural locations.
Three of the seven organisations were not 'large' (less than 250 employees) but had a few offices around the country or local area. In these workshops there was usually a larger number of participants who knew each other prior to the workshop and in two of these workshops in particular we found it led to a greater level of interaction between the facilitators and participants. The participants in these workshops typically did similar jobs and undertook similar journeys.
One pilot workshop was conducted with young drivers from five different small firms in the West Midlands. The young drivers took very different journeys in different vehicle types. The composition of this workshop was similar to the larger workshops.
Not every employer who enquired about the workshop eventually asked for one to be delivered, and sadly the number of enquiries received outstripped our capacity to run pilot workshops.
Before the pilots began, one practice workshop was run with young staff in-house to help train the facilitators.
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