RSSB won two gold awards for our RED safety videos

This week, RSSB won the Gold award in two categories at the Corporate Engagement Awards, for ‘Best Execution’ and ‘Best Internal Engagement’, for the RED videos. 

RED is a video specifically for frontline staff. Each episode focuses on one topic from the perspective of frontline staff. Frontline staff are vital in improving safety on the railway but communicating with them effectively can be a challenge. Long, wordy or boring reports just won’t work in this context. 

So RED was designed to use engaging videos with compelling re-enactments of actual accidents, near-misses or difficult work situations. The upside is that this really brings issues to life. It enables frontline staff to reflect and learn in a highly accessible way directly related to their work experience. The downside is that producing videos of this type opens the door to lots of difficult challenge and unexpected events.

For instance, on one occasion filming took place during the ‘Beast from the East’ period of very cold weather. The crew needed to film just one real train that was actually in service that day, and most of the trains at the agreed location were cancelled that day. Sequentially. This meant that the film crew had their hopes dashed, little cold bit by little colder bit. But the film crew didn’t lose hope and eventually, after many hours of waiting in the freezing cold, the crew were able to film an actual real train going past. Bliss!

This is just one example that shows the collaboration and teamwork involved in RED. Successfully producing RED videos requires extensive contributions from many different people, including the RED editorial board, the involvement of industry, RSSB content experts as well as the video production company Big Button. They should already be proud of RED.  It is excellent to see that the quality of RED is now recognised by media professionals outside the rail industry too.

The two Gold awards at the Corporate Engagement Awards this week are for ‘Best Execution’ and ‘Best Internal Engagement’. The Best Execution award celebrates the project or programme that ‘most effectively carried out its intended task’, with judges basing their decision on both the quality of the output as well as the challenges and obstacles overcome. The ‘Best Internal Engagement’ award applies because frontline rail staff are also members of RSSB. This award looks at how the audience were involved in the communication process, and for creative aspects that excited them. Given the purpose, target audience and challenges of producing RED it’s a very worthy winner of these awards.

It’s great to see the media industry recognising the excellence of RED, its creativity and effectiveness in engaging frontline workers, as well as the difficulties of producing it. RED really is a collaborative effort. Big Button and RSSB are rightly proud, but the whole industry should be celebrating too.