DSE Home > Effective Engagement > Developing an Engagement Plan > Initial Considerations

Initial Considerations

• Forming a Project Team
• Risk Management
• Occupational Health and Safety

Forming a Project Team

Team support and mentoring is an important component of the engagement process. While the nature of a project sometimes requires people to work on their own, there are a number of advantages to developing the Engagement Plan within a team, including:

• It allows for the inclusion of a depth and breadth of views, ensuring diversity is built into the planning process
• The workload and the learning opportunities can be distributed more evenly - if the purpose of the engagement is to encourage action and change, the people directly involved in the process are more likely to move with the change.

Engagement team members may come from within your existing project team, or they may be external, depending on the skills required. The composition of the project team may also change throughout the development and implementation of the Engagement Plan. The team composition will reflect the different tasks and skill sets required at each step of the engagement process.

Depending on the dimensions of your Engagement Plan, the following criteria may assist in developing a project team for the engagement component of your project:

• The range of experience and skills (e.g. local knowledge, familiarity with community engagement processes, existing relationships with stakeholders)
• The physical location of team members
• The level of diversity within the team (internal and external to your overall project).

page top
.
Risk Management

Risks associated with community engagement can be classified as being either:

• risks you are trying to address by conducting the engagement
• risks that could prevent you from achieving the objectives of your engagement.

Business units or project teams that have deliverables for which they are responsible often cite the community as one of their sources of risk. The risk can be related to either the community not doing something that is required to achieve the desired outcome, or the community doing something that prevents the project team from achieving their objectives (e.g. blockades). Engaging the key project stakeholders is often a strategy used to mitigate this risk.

If risk mitigation is your goal for conducting the engagement, this should be clearly stated up front. You also need to be careful that your engagement is actually going to reduce the likelihood of the risk eventuating. By not conducting the engagement properly, you could increase the risk instead of mitigating it.

Further information and specific processes to manage risk in a community engagement can be found in the 'Risk Management' section of Book 2: the engagement planning workbook.

page top

Occupational Health and Safety

The health and safety of employees, volunteers, contractors and community members is critical to any engagement activity, event and program. Risks to health and safety need to be identified in the planning stage, and a risk control plan developed, implemented and monitored.

Often the engagement component of your project will require you to bring stakeholders together in public places (local hall, park, etc.). In such instances, it is recommended that you first undertake a safety audit of the site to identify local hazards and risks. A site safety audit is used to record each hazard or risk and then the proposed action to control these. This can include simple things like making sure water is available for all participants. The process should also cover disability (mobility, sight, hearing, etc.), gender and specific cultural requirements.

All organisations participating in the project are advised to meet regularly during the course of the engagement to ensure all OH&S controls are being implemented within the agreed timelines.

Where OH&S issues are identified during the course of the engagement, the impact of these hazards or risks is to be assessed. If they are considered to be high risk, activities should cease until effective controls are implemented.

DSE staff are required to complete a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) to identify and assess occupational health and safety risks associated with undertaking work duties within the workplace. This procedure is designed to ensure DSE maintains a safe and healthy workplace for all its employees, contractors and visitors.

The JSA includes a Site Safety Survey which is an onsite check of the job environment, to be used when conducting activities at non-DSE locations. This also applies to activities involving DSE staff being run by other organisations. DSE require a level equal to or higher than DSE’s own OH&S and risk management practices be followed by staff, contractors and volunteers of the non-DSE organisation.

DSE staff should refer to the ‘Policies & Procedures’ section of the organisation’s intranet for the latest versions of the Job Safety Analysis and Site Safety Survey.

Non-DSE staff are advised that they need to complete similar documentation to ensure they meet their public liability responsibilities, and should refer to their own organisation’s OH&S and risk management policies and procedures.

page top