To win a RoSPA Health and Safety Award is by no means an easy feat. Last year alone, we received close to 2,000 entries from across the globe. To achieve one gold achievement 
award is a fantastic accolade for your organization… however, to continue that winning streak year after year is outstanding. In 2019, Nottingham based civil and electrical engineering firm J. McCann & Co. Ltd. did just that and achieved their fourth RoSPA Gold Achievement Award (and they couldn’t be more delighted).
An Achievement Award truly is the accolade that safety professionals across all industries aspire to. In our latest interview with four-time Gold Award Winner, J. McCann & Co. Ltd explains how winning a RoSPA Award has impacted their organization…
What motivated you/your organization to enter the RoSPA Awards?
Entering the RoSPA Awards motivates our organization to drive improvements for our safe systems of work, year upon year. It also allows us to demonstrate our commitment to the safety of our staff, contractors and all others affected by our work, whilst enabling us to showcase and celebrate the success of our workforce, who work to an award-winning standard.
Winning a Gold Award for the fourth consecutive year is proof of how entry into the awards process drives and develops our systems.
What benefits does winning a RoSPA Award have for you/your organization?
Winning a RoSPA award supports our strong health and safety culture that we have here at McCann and helps to provide great supporting evidence to a client’s Pre-qualification Questionnaires (PQQs).
We also display that we are a RoSPA Gold Award Winner in all of our email signatures, which helps to promote us as an organization that works to extremely high standards, especially when it comes to health and safety.
What do you enjoy most about the RoSPA Awards process?
We always look forward to the awards dinner because it is a great opportunity for our support staff to receive recognition for the very important work they do. We arrange for as many of them as possible to be at the dinner where they can relax and meet with other employees from our site and celebrate shared success.
What do you think the applicant could do over the year to keep drafting an award submission simple?
To guarantee a straight forward submission, it is important to remain organized. Initially, you should read the RoSPA submission guidance and take the time to digest all the information and thoroughly understand it.
Assigning the responsibility to one person ensures that they are focused on the submission and can take control of what is needed at each stage. The designated employee should then make folders for each of the submission headings and collate evidence as they go, for example, saving any relevant emails. When filing evidence, it is useful to categorize the evidence early on as this will help prevent repetition of evidence across different categories.
What advice would you give to organizations considering entering the awards for the first time, or how would you convince organizations not to enter the awards to start entering?
First of all, the awards are about telling the story of what is going well using the information you already have, which can be simpler than you may assume, so it is always worth entering. Also, don’t avoid entering if you have had an incident at work. The RoSPA Awards are a great opportunity to show that you have developed mature safety processes, but can also show how you learn from such incidents to prevent them from happening again. This can also lead to opportunities to demonstrate key learning and share findings with the rest of your wider industry.
We would advise not repeating the same evidence in the categories, which is where preparation and organization play a huge part. It’s also good to remember that less is more with your written submission. Drafts 
your document and check the word count, you will likely exceed the word limit the first time you do it but keep working on it until it’s as succinct as possible.
So what’s stopping you? The process of joining the global RoSPA Award-winning community couldn’t be simpler. Simply visit www.rospa.com/awards, register online, and submit your entry via our online portal. First-time entrants? Don’t worry, as support and guidance is available through our mentoring scheme – read this blog to find out more.