How to write an award-winning entry

Matthew Cryer, Head of Awards, talks about what you need to do to write an award-winning entry.

Decide who is going to enter the RoSPA Awards

With the RoSPA Awards, we have many organisations that enter for different areas of their business. Some organisations decide to enter the entire organisation or group, whereas others may choose to enter different branches, allowing them to compete against one another to see who has the best implementation of the group’s health and safety management system. Alternatively, contracting organisations regularly decide to enter specific projects, to show they have been delivered to a high standard of health and safety.

It’s key to understand who is entering for the RoSPA Awards, and make sure that the answers to the questions and supporting evidence are all relevant to that organisation, branch or project.

Create a winning RoSPA Awards strategy

Now you understand the scope of your Health and Safety Award make sure you understand which award category you are going to enter.

If you want to look at your health and safety individually, and receive a certificate base on our mark scheme, then the Achievement Awards are for you. If you think your organisation has the best health and safety performance within your sector – then enter our competitive Sector awards. Alternatively, if your organisation has a fleet of vehicles and you manage it well, the Fleet Safety Awards are for you.

Once you have decided on your Health and Safety Awards category, make sure you have access to all the resources, information and knowledge required to complete the entry. Start by having a discussion with your team, reflect on the last year, and plan how you will gather all the information and documentation to support your entry.

Follow your award’s guidance document

Make sure you follow the on-screen guidance when you start to answer the specific questions, and follow the additional awards guidance documents for your category to the letter too, to ensure you don’t go off track, or stray onto topics that will be awarded marks in other parts of the submission. They can be found on their own tab, within each category’s entry form. Remember that the awards process is a reflection piece, through which you need to explain the workings of your health and safety management systems and then show it in action. Which brings us on to evidence.

Where is the evidence?

Within your awards entry make sure that you back up as many of your claims as possible with supporting evidence, using reports, graphs, images, documents, minutes of meetings etc. Your organisation will not win an award by simply stating what you do; you need to be able to show and provide evidence of your organisation implementing its health and safety management systems. You can provide up to eight such documents for every question response.

Remember that not fully demonstrating your point can be the difference between a merit to bronze, bronze to silver, silver to gold etc.