I'm sure this is a constant problem for lots of us! I’ve identified a need for first aiders, fire evacuation marshals and spill team members. I’ve assessed the risk and decided upon the numbers of people I consider we need for each of these roles. Taking into account the risks associated with the activities, the number of people and the local environment. It’s odd though because there are plenty of fire marshals on one site, but not on the other, and for first aid it’s the other way round. One site has had a non-work related fatality (5 years ago now) which could well have frightened people preventing them volunteering for first aid (we did offer support to those who had been affected). Spill team members are hard to get on both sites. I can understand the issue on one site where we require breathing apparatus (BA) training. We have amended this so that we don’t do the crawling through smoke filled rooms stuff (it’s not going to happen our risk assessments forbid such activities). We did this in the hope to get numbers up, but it didn’t work. We allow women to be on the BA teams now but again this has had no effect. I can’t think of any reason for the fire marshal discrepancy though. But now I’m stuck because I can’t seem to get enough people to volunteer. We pay a small stipend to encourage engagement. I’m doing a presentation to each site on Health and Safety culture soon, so I’m going to use this to show how the sites are different in the hope that this might help but I’m obviously grasping at straws. Has anyone here got any out of the box ideas? Thanks as ever for any responses.

That's a good point, I'll investigate. Thanks

Your organisation seems to have a lack of top management/leadership commitment etc. i.e. not a strong/mature safety culture In our case ( we have an extremely positive & mature safety culture) it is a "accepted" requirement that every employee on the site has at least one annual "safety" goal and there are generally no problems in volunteers for first aid, spill response, auditing, inspections, leading risk assessments for their teams etc. The leadership also participate in some of the roles and positively encourage their team members to participate.

Senior managers leading by example is great but may still not unlock the (real of perceived) barriers to volunteer participation. It may be useful to engage directly with those members of staff who are the unofficial leaders i.e. those whose opinions are respected by significant numbers of people. There will be reasons for the lack of responses and they may hold the keys to resolving any issues that may exist.