Technical Specifications for Tender Number 2007/XXXXXXX Concerning a Survey of Enterprises

EU-OSHA open tender procedure EUOSHA-PRU/2014/P-3

Tender specifications

Development of an online multilingual e-guideto support companies in occupational safety and health (OSH) management in the context of an ageing workforce

- SERVICE CONTRACT -

OPEN TENDER PROCEDURE
No. EUOSHA-PRU/2014/P-3

(OJ No.2014/S 178-313728, Tender No.313728-2014)

TENDER DOCUMENTS ARE AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD AT:

CONTRACTING AUTHORITY:

European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

C/Santiago de Compostela 12

E-48003 Bilbao

Tel: +34 944 358382

E-mail:

Internet:

Tel: +34 944 358382ENGLISH LANGUAGE ORIGINAL

CONTENT

1.Purpose and context of the CONTRACT

1.1The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

Organisation

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) was established, with the adoption of its founding regulation in 1994, with the aim of providing the EU bodies, the Member States, the social partners and those involved in the field with useful technical, scientific and economic information relating to safety and health at work. This aim has guided the work of EU-OSHA since then, and also forms the framework for the current Multi-annual Strategic Programme (MSP).

The Agency’s vision is to be a recognised leader promoting healthy and safe workplaces in Europe based on tripartism, participation and the development of an occupational safety and health(OSH) risk prevention culture, to ensure a smart, sustainable, productive and inclusive economy

To achieve this goal, the Agency develops, gathers and provide reliable and relevant information, analysis and tools to advance knowledge, raise awareness and exchange occupational safety and health (OSH) information and good practice which will serve the needs of those involved in OSH

As a tripartite organisation, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work works closely with governments, employers’ and workers’ representatives.

Priority areas

For 2014-2020, EU-OSHA has six priority areas defined which reflect the strategic objectives of the Agency, each of those areas including severalactivities.

Priority area 1: Anticipating change and new and emerging risks to occupational safety and health

Priority area 2: Facts and figures

Priority area 3: Tools for OSH management

Priority area 4: Raising awareness

Priority area 5: Networking knowledge

Priority area 6: Networking and Corporate Communications

The priority area of Raising awareness covers activities aiming to get the occupational safety and health message across to multiple intermediaries and beneficiaries, including the Agency’s flagship Healthy Workplaces Campaigns.

Healthy Workplaces Campaigns are decentralised campaigns co-ordinated by the Agency that can be tailored by our focal points in the Member States, partner organisations and individual workplaces to fit their particular needs and priorities, allowing them to organise their own activities and produce their own materials.

Each campaign runs for two years and involves two years of preparatory work. The themes of the campaigns are decided by the Governing Board two-three years in advance of the start of the campaign to allow time for preparations.The 2016-2017 campaign will be on healthy ageing at work, the exact title of the Campaign to be decided later.

1.2Background specific to this contract

Population ageing and its implications for socioeconomic systems, such as public pensions systems and health care, will be a key challenge in many European countries over the next fifty years. The combination of a smaller working population and a higher share of retired people will put additional pressure on EU welfare systems. To ensure the sustainability of Europe's unique social models, people will need to work longer and employment rates need to be increased. Pension reforms have been introduced recently in many EU countries. But to prevent a situation where raising the retirement age leads to an increased incidence of early retirement and claims for disability pensions, measures also need to be taken at the workplace to support the changes in pension systems and to enable and encourage people to continue working until the retirement age and retire in good health. Promoting healthy and active ageing is also a prerequisite for social cohesion and higher productivity.

In June 2010 the European Council adopted the new 10-year Europe 2020 Strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth[1], a strategy for delivering high levels of employment, productivity and growth, and at the same time social cohesion. The Strategy identifies the demographic change as one of the major challenges Europe faces and emphasises that Europe needs to make full use of its labour potential to face the challenges of an ageing population and rising global competition. The Strategy proposes a measurable target for employment for the EU for 2020: 75 % of the population aged 20-64 should be employed by 2020. To achieve this goal, the employment rate of workers aged 55–64 must increase substantially. The Strategy also emphasises the importance of promoting a healthy and active ageing population to allow for social cohesion and higher productivity and that major effort will be needed to combat poverty and social exclusion and reduce health inequalities.

Tackling demographic change is also identified as one of the challenges for OSH in the recently launched EU Strategic Framework on Health and safety at Work 2014-2020. The Communication emphasises, that sound health and safety at work is necessary for a sustainable working life and active and healthy ageing, especially in light of the ageing working population.

The promotion of a culture of prevention is essential to achieving this. One of the strategic objectives defined in the Framework is to address the ageing of the workforce, including the identification and exchange of good practice on ways to improve OSH conditions for older workers and to promote rehabilitation and reintegration measures. The Communication specifically mentions the Healthy Workplaces Campaign 2016-17 in this context.

The HWC 2016-17 will address the need to

• Support European policies aiming at increasing the employment rate and prolonging the working life, improving population’s health, promoting social inclusion, and reducing health inequalities
• Promote healthy ageing at work by focussing on prevention throughout the working life, and in particular on health and safety issues that enable and motivate people to remain longer on the labour market and retire in good health, including rehabilitation and return to work.
• Assist companies, including SMEs, in dealing with the challenges related to an ageing workforce
• Disseminate and exchange information and good practice in this area

EU-OSHA’s Healthy Workplace Campaign 2016-2017 aims at

• Promoting healthy ageing at work and the importance of prevention throughout the whole working life.
• Assistingworkplaces, includingSMEs by providing information and tools for managing OSH in the context of an ageing workforce.
• Facilitating exchange of information and good practice in this area.
• Raising awareness of the facts of ageing to support an age sensitive risk assessment

The message which the Agency wants to convey across European companies of different sizes and sectors is that in order to ensure healthy ageing at work and retirement in good health, it is necessary to guarantee safe and healthyworkplaces for workers of all ages throughout their working life. This is a prerequisite for productivity and competitiveness, and a sustainable and inclusive society.

The main communication, promotion and distribution channel of the Healthy Workplace Campaign is its dedicated multilingual website, which is updated on an ongoing basis for the whole length of the campaign (2 years). All campaign-related material is published onthis website. As part of its 2016-2017 Healthy Workplaces Campaign, the Agency wants to offer aan e-guide addressed to workplaces of all sizes, including small enterprises, managers/employers, HR managersand workers alike, that will be promoted across all EU Member States.

2.Subject of the contract

2.1Objective

This call for tender invites bids for the production of31 national versions of ane-guide / web application(hereafter ‘e-guide’) aimed at workplaces.

The objective of the e-guide is to provide workplaces with information and support for OSH management in the context of an ageing workforce.More specifically, the aim is to increaseawareness and knowledge related to the ageing of the workforce, the ageing process itself and its implications at the workplace, and to provide practical guidance on how to deal with the related challenges.

The e-guide will:

• target workplaces, including SMEs;
• stress the benefits of prevention for all throughout the whole working lifebased, on a holistic approach;
• address the most common concerns related to the ageing of the workforce;
• provide unbiased, evidence-based information and examples of solutions, taking account of the available national or sectoral good practice, instruments, and tools;
• be informative, user-friendly, interactive, engaging, innovative, and visually attractive.

In developing an e-guide, EU-OSHA wants to take advantage of the possibilities offered by content viewed on electronic devices compared with traditional paper-based formats. As such, the e-guide should:

• Provide convenient access to existing online resources
• Allow content to be tailored to different target groups
• Allow interaction at different levels, so giving users the option of gaining a quick overview of the most important issues or of learning about them in more depth
• Be an appealing product that that can be promoted as a key support to the Healthy Workplaces Campaign

2.2Description of the services to be provided

The services will include:

• Development and validation of the content of anEnglish-language master version of the e-guide
• The design and technical development of thee-guide, including usability testing, and its integration with the open-source web content management system used by EU-OSHA (Drupal WCM).
• Preparation of national versions of the e-guide, covering all EU Member States, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway. The task will require both professional translation and expert validation of the content for each country.
• Integration of the nationalversions into the master version of the e-guide.
• Delivery of an e-guide, with the required national versionsto EU-OSHA. This will include passing the testing phase in EU-OSHA’s staging environment as well as providing support for the deployment in Production to ensure that it is bug-free.
• A development warrantee for one year after delivering the final versions of the e-guide. A period during which the contractor will be responsible for resolvingtechnical incidents.

WORK PACKAGE I

Task 1 - Content development

The e-guide will be developed on the basis of relevant international and national resources, including currentlyavailable tools aimed at facilitating OSH management in the context of an ageing workforce. In developing the content, the contractor must draw on existing state-of-the-art research and information. The contractor should take into account the following resources, amongst others, in the development of the content for the e-guide:

• Information gathered under EU-OSHA’s on-going project for the European Parliament: ‘Safer and healthier work at any age’.
  A brief description of the project is available at:

The relevant materials will be made available to the contractor after the kick-off meeting.

• Reports, studies, articles, and at conference papers, etc., related to the topic.
• Tools and good practice examples
• Resources related to Workplace Health Promotion, making a clear distinction between measures taken to fulfil legal obligations, and activities taken on a voluntary basis that are beyond legal requirements.

The results of the evaluation of the existing resources will be documented by the contractor and presented in the form of a technical report to EU-OSHA. The aim of this report is justifying the content and the structure of this content in the e-guide developed by the contractor.

Issues that the e-guide should cover include those described below:

• Age and work
  Aim: Raising awareness
  Content: Is age relevant for the working life? In which way? What are the implications for OSH?
• Factors that affect the ageing process
  Aim: To inform and prompt action on health protection and preventionon one hand and health promotion on the other
  Content: Description of the factors that have an impact on the ageing process and the complex mechanisms of ageing, showing that the ageing processand the changes it implies do not solely result from the passage of the time.Some of the factors can and should be prevented with some knowledge and effort.
• Age and diversity sensitive risk assessment
  Aim: Providing information to support an age and diversity sensitive risk assessment
  Content: Unbiased information on the ageing process and related changes in functional capacities that need to be taken into account in the risk assessment. Gender aspects. Hazards and risks particularly relevant for older workers. Job and sector specific issues.
• Adapting work and the working environment to changing capacities
  Aim: Providing information and examples of solutions
  Content: Information on how the work and the work environment can be adapted to changing capacities and health status of workers. Examples of solutions and tools.
• Work ability and its promotion
  Aim: Presenting the holistic work ability model
  Content: Description of the different dimensions of work ability, how work ability can be measured, how the model can be used in the context of an ageing workforce.
• Workplace Health Promotion (WHP)
  Aim: To motivate employers to promote healthy choices at work and workers to participate in workplace health promotion activities.
  Content: Information on how nutrition, physical activity, lifestyle influence the ageing process. Examples of WHP activities.
• Disability prevention, rehabilitation and return to work
  Aim: Providing information and good practice examples
  Content: Information on what can be done to prevent early exit from the labour market due to work disability. Good practice examples.
• Mini glossary
  Aim: To clarify the terminology used in the e-guide
  Content: Definitions

In their offer, tenderersshould elaborate on this suggested content and are encouraged to propose additional issues and an appropriate structure for presenting the information,and viewing and navigating the content. Tenderers must bear in mind that the information should not give a negative impression of ageing or of older workers.

The content of the e-guide will be developed in close collaboration with EU-OSHA taking account of end-user input through the validation task described below. The final structure and content shall be agreed with EU-OSHA.

When developing the content and the structure of the e-guide, the contractor must take into consideration the needs and characteristics of various target audiences (larger companies, SMEs enterprises, HR managers, workers representatives, workers, labour inspectors, etc.). All the information included must be presented clearly, concisely, and at a level appropriate for the target audience. The content must be simple to follow and adapted to the reality of workplaces. The e-guide must be relevant to all EU Member States and be in line with the provisions of the Framework Directive 89/391/EEC, and other relevant EU legislation.

As mentioned above, the development of the e-guide content will include content validation with end–users in order to ensure that the information covers the necessary issues, is pitched at the correct level and is engaging and useful.Tenderers must describe the validation process that they would undertake, including consultations with different target audiences, such as managers and workers or workers’ representatives, HR managers, etc.In their offer, tenderers must give a comprehensive description of their methodology, detailing the level of staff involved, duration and type of interviewing if appropriate.

The development of the content and its structure must go hand in hand with the technical development of the e-guide, taking into account the requirements presented under Task 2 and Task 3.

Task 2–Technical development of the e-guide

The contractor will develop an interactivee-guidethat allows user-friendly viewing and navigation, and interaction at different levels. The e-guide is expected to be informative, user friendly, interactive, engaging, innovative, and visually attractive. It mayalso include some entertaining elements, such as games or quizzes. The purpose of interactive components is to make the e-guide attractive, to help tailor the content to different target audiences, and to guide the users through the content.

As technical requirements, the contractor should comply with the following:

• The user interface should be developed in HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript unless the tenderer justifies alternative open source software.
• In order to ensure consistency of the layout with other EU-OSHA HWC 2016-17 products, EU-OSHA will deliver the branding guidelinesthat the contractor will have to follow, at the beginning of the project.
• For the content management, the contractor will use EU-OSHA’s corporate WCM system, Drupal WCM.During the technical design, any additionalfeature not already covered by Drupal’sstandard functionality will be analysed and discussed with EU-OSHA to find a solution avoidingduplication with existing adaptations.
• The e-guide must be designed to provide detailed user statistics and should allow the inclusion of a user satisfaction survey.

The development process must include the following steps:

• Design of the e-guide, including the functional and technical aspects, to be validated by EU-OSHA.
• Development of a pilot in order that EU-OSHA can validate the e-guide’s interface and its most important features before continuing.
• Development of the complete English master version of the e-guide, as an extension of the previous pilot integrated in the WCM.
• Testing of the e-guide by EU-OSHA, in its Staging environment: the contractor shall organise the user acceptance tests (UAT) with key users, allowing at least 4 weeks for testing.
• Provision of guidelines and support for the first deployments in EU-OSHA’s staging and production environment. Hosting services are not requested as they will be covered by EU-OSHA.

Tenderers should propose a methodology and plan aligned with these requirements and their own best practices. EU-OSHA will closely follow all phases of the technical development of the e-guide to ensure good quality outcome.