Have a Happy & Safe New Year!

AwardSafety wishes you a safe and healthy new year and wants to thank you for the many positive comments and support we have received on our safety award systems! 

Shifting to a Positive Safety Program

What’s more effective in changing safety behavior?  Is it waiting until the end of the month or quarter to let your employees know that they missed their safety objective by 10%?  Is it showing them what they did wrong and how much it costs the company after they’ve had an accident?  Or, is it observing a positive safety behavior on the job and thanking them for that safe performance? 

By and large, the entire discussion of being safe is negative.  To discuss being safe means you have to discuss the consequences of not being safe.  The dictionary defines safety as “the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury.” Safety is generally interpreted as implying a real and significant impact on risk of death, injury or damage to property.

When you shift your focus on the direction you want to move, the positive outcomes, you will create a more positive safety culture, higher morale and improved workplace productivity.  When you focus on what you want to achieve and give clear and concise tools on how to achieve them, you are well on your way to a positive environment. 

When you recognize safety performance on a continuous and consistent basis, you will form positive safety habits.  Make sure your employees go home at the end of the day knowing they made a difference, knowing they had been listened to, knowing their efforts had been appreciated. 

When you refocus your attentions on positive change, you will concentrate on your own leading indicators to safety.  You will not be comparing yourself to other industry or national standards, you will be comparing yourself to your own results, you aren’t average, so don’t

make average your goal.  When you compare yourself to your own results and improving daily to make a positive difference, you will have positive results.

Sometimes the safety industry gets a little too analytical.  Developing safety competence takes time and that’s the advantage of working with your employees on a daily basis.  It means being in the workers environments, understanding their daily challenges, and offering new ways to act or think about them from a positive perspective

After all, life is really simple; we create the circumstances that complicate it. 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net.

Holiday Shopping and Safety Incentives

What does holiday shopping have to do with safety incentives?  It is the best time of the year to prove to any safety professional contemplating a safety incentive program that giving your employees a choice of any award they want it is a key to the success of your program. 

This holiday season sales are expected to be in excess of $655 billion.  Online Black Friday sales alone exceeded $3 billion!  So what did they buy and where did they buy it? You name it, anywhere and everywhere.  Certainly the national bricks and mortar retailers and their websites got the lion share of the sales, but many regional retailers had millions in sales as well.  In addition the online-only companies achieved huge sales as well, the foremost being Amazon.

Our point, when you plan an incentive program, it is virtually impossible to pick the handful of retailers or merchandise items that will appeal to your entire workforce, so why try.

Almost all incentive studies have shown that gift cards are the most popular and effective options within the safety incentive category. Over 80% of respondents to Incentive Magazine’s “Gift Card IQ” survey are currently using gift cards in their reward programs.

Some gift card suppliers would like YOU to choose which gift cards to offer in your incentive programs and will recommend what gift card brands would be most effective based on the unique composition of your employee base. That may be one way to do it, we however think you should give that option to your employees and let them choose the one they want.

As mentioned, it is virtually impossible to pick the handful of card brands that will appeal to all your employees.  Use a gift card system that will allow them to choose from a much larger list of brands that comprises over 95% of all retail sales.  Then you will have an incentive with far greater motivational appeal.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Will Safety Training Change Behaviors?

Yes, but only for the short term.  In terms of behavior based safety, training is an antecedent...or an event that comes before a behavior and sets the stage for the performance to be done well.  While training is essential in building any effective safety culture, it will not alone change someone into performing safely on an ongoing basis.

To make safety training as effective as it can be you need to add the other integral pieces of the behavioral model.  You must measure the performance letting your employee know what and how they are doing, give them their feedback and then provide them with a positive consequence when appropriate.

In essence with training you are educating why, then showing a person how and what or what not to do.  Antecedents alone result in temporary behavior change at best.  Consequences must be used to if permanent behavior change is desired.  

For a whitepaper that discusses how to turn a safe behavior into a habit, please click here.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Making Your Safety Training More Effective

According to weekly safety poll conducted by Business and Legal Reports, when safety management was asked about the effectiveness of their safety training,

Ø 47% responded it was just ok

Ø 47% responded that it needed work

Ø 7% didn’t have any safety training

In a lively discussion that we followed a while back on LinkedIn, there were a great many

comments from safety professionals about how ineffective safety training really was, which would seem to correspond to the above poll.  As many millions are spent on safety training, does this poll really reflect that almost 50% of it is misspent?

If you’re not getting the bang for the buck you spend on safety training, you might want to view it from a different perspective.  Are you educating your workers on being safe?  Or are you training them on how to be safe?  This is not just semantics; the outcome of your training is a cornerstone of your safety culture. 

 

There's a big difference between education and training. One can be highly educated without necessarily being trained. Organizations such as the American Red Cross have known this for years, which is why you can't be certified in first aid or CPR just by taking a written exam. You have to demonstrate that you can do certain things.

To make it as effective as it can be, consider using feedback mechanisms to constantly tell them how they are performing, and then reward them with positive reinforcement when they perform well.  Behavior based safety rewards can be powerful when combined with training and help make an effective tool to improve your overall safety performance.

Successful safety cultures constantly measure how effective their training is. They monitor performance with hands on coaching and feedback on a continuous basis. Training becomes embedded in the everyday workplace when your workers can demonstrate proficiency in carrying out their tasks the way in which they were trained. If participants can perform the tasks, the training has been effective. If they can't, it hasn't.

For more information on how the AwardSafety solutions can positively affect your safety training please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net.

Creating a Behavioral Safety Program.

The article, Creating a Behavioral SafetyProgram, appeared in Safeopedia on November 3, 2016. It was written Chad Lilley a specialist in behavioral safety and safety culture development.  We have saved this article as a white paper in our collection as you might want to revisit it as it offers some excellent advice for companies who want start a behavioral based safety effort.

We found the following paragraph from the of particular interest because it dwelled on what we have been recommending for years, using a positive approach to safety and shifting emotions in the direction you want your workers to take.

“We need to shift emotions in the direction we want to move. Let’s concentrate on what is possible, what we can achieve by working together, by looking out for each other, by celebrating the small wins, acknowledging the people working beside us, and making people feel better about themselves. Instead of sending people home the same as they came in, why can’t we send them home better? What if people went home at the end of the day knowing they made a difference, knowing they had been listened to, knowing their efforts had been appreciated—how would that feel? And yes, it’s all possible, and it’s possible anywhere in the world and in any culture.”

AwardSafety has been recommending and implementing award systems for behavior based safety efforts for many years. We created a new safety award, On the Spot, to make is easy for our clients to positively reinforce safe behaviors whenever they occurred. We guide

clients on how to use these award systems to build safe on safety performance and turn this performance into a habit.  By using small dollar awards and issuing them to workers on a consistent and continuous basis we have shown clients how to do away with cash programs that were not only far more expensive but could also drew the attention of OSHA as programs that actually promoted the non-reporting of injuries and accidents.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

What Clients Say About Our Safety Incentive Programs

The end result of any safety award system should be to first prevent, and then to reduce, incidents of injuries and accidents.  Our gift card award solutions have been doing that for years with diverse organizations across many industry segments. But rather than US telling you about our programs, we want you to hear what our clients have been saying.

Here's just a sample of the feedback we've received from our customers over the years:

"...We've used all kinds of safety incentive awards over the years, but yours is by far the easiest to administer, has the lowest price, and provides us with a perfect way to motivate behavior change.  On a recent audit of one of our facilities we were praised by OSHA for having a terrific non-traditional safety award system"

"...This is the best $ for $ value of any incentive program I've ever seen.  The vast majority of the budget goes where you want it to go, in the hands of your people."

"...This is our third year using the On the Spot safety award and it is a just what we needed to motivate safe behaviors in our manufacturing facilities.  It is easy to use and very cost effective."

We maintain a ongoing file of feedback via program surveys to our clients, click here for a copy of the most recent listings.

For information on any of our Award Safety products, please contact us here.

Values and Practices that Make the World’s Safest Organizations.

Ten years ago, Williams International and O/E Learning Inc., benchmarked companies with excellent safety records to determine the values and practices that made those companies excel in safety performance.

After refining what they learned from reviewing the common practices of safety inspections, hazard investigations, strategy development and safety workshops, they came up the following six values.

While your views and opinions might differ in part or priority of these values, we submit that they would make a great starting point for any organization wishing to reengage or improve their safety culture.

All injuries are preventable—no one really wants to be injured, corporate processes aren’t designed to hurt the workers, so injuries should be predictable and avoidable.

Compliance is not enough—the world’s safest organizations believe that compliance is the starting point, but recognize that it takes more than VPP certification to protect workers.

Prevention is more valuable than correction—Best in class safety organizations spend their safety budgets on eliminating hazards before a worker gets hurt.

Safety is everyone’s job—workers at the world’s safest organizations understand their ongoing roles in keeping themselves and others, safe.

Safety is a strategic business element—corporate leadership needs to believe and continually communicate that safety needs to be managed as professionally as every other strategic objective.

Safety should be a part of Operations—the area of the company that has the greatest control over the safety of the workplace is Operations; while other departments, such as HR or Finance may play an important role, Operations should have the responsibility over the safety of the workforce. 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

How to Stop Workplace Hazards Before They Happen

It is essential that the employees report safety hazards when they are encountered. Employees are the most familiar with the detail and functions of the job or the jobsite and it is critical that they become the communications conduit to maintaining the safety of that job function. 

However, many employees are reluctant to report the dangers that may be encountered.  They can fear reprisals from management or simply don’t feel comfortable approaching higher management in these situations.  While this  may seem unlikely to most management, it nevertheless can happen and often does…as attested by studies for the last few years showing that the number of complaints filed with OSHA by workers who claimed to have been penalized increased by 50%.    Of course, reporting hazards is not only helpful, it is mandatory by the clear rules set up by OSHA in VPP in 2015.

Some Fundamentals Things You Can Do To Encourage Reporting

For the last few months, we interviewed several client safety professionals who had implemented hazard abatement programs in their companies.  Following is list of several of the ideas they shared with us about their progams:

• Assure employees that management will not retaliate in any way when a hazard is reported.  In fact consider this action as a time for recognition and reward

• Set up an easy process for reporting, don’t make it arduous or time consuming and clearly set up the chain of command involved.

• Have a sense of urgency and set up a timeline from reporting to the rectification

• Make sure your employees understand the consequences of not reporting hazards, which could
  
  include illness, injury or loss of life and in addition lead to financial penalties for themselves or their employers

• Set up a feedback mechanism so employees can see that their reporting results in a positive action of the hazard being removed and dangerous workplace habits corrected

• Publically acknowledge and recognize the employees’ and/or department’s initiative to report, with special mention in company communications, visits and meetings with appropriate executives, special celebrations etc.

• Positively issue each employee involved with an appropriate tangible award in recognition of their accomplishment in correcting serious hazards and as a reminder that they all share the responsibility of the wellbeing of their co-workers

• Institute recertification or re-training sessions with emphasis on best practices and new strategies now being employed

When you put these steps into action you are completely changing the dynamics about a subject that could have easily been a difficult negative turning it into something that is completely positive. 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Safety Incentives, the Insurance Policy on Your Safety Initiative

How much time do you spend on building an OSH culture?  How much money do you spend on safety training; on analytical assessments; PPE; safety committees; safety communication; and  host of other safety expenses?  These and many other things are what make up the pieces in your safety initiative.

Do you buy insurance to make those sections of your culture work together effectively? 

A well designed safety incentive campaign will act as an insurance policy to motivate your

employees to follow all the pieces of your safety initiative.  It can be the final ingredient that can help all the other pieces work smoothly.

Safety awards should be designed to reinforce good safety behaviors and change bad behavior. Don’t just look at them to recognize the results at the end, look at them to help drive results along the way.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

How Safety Awards are Taxed

Of all the questions we get, this is one of the most often asked.  The reason is that the IRS rulings on the taxation of awards are not as clear as they should be, and because there are some incentive companies that twist these rulings to say that their award systems are not taxable.  Of course like anything else these days, especially in the favorite national pastime, American politics, the real answer is somewhere in between all the misc. rhetoric that we hear.   The trick is to sort out the rhetoric and find the truth for your own circumstances. 
The facts are that some safety awards are not taxable, some are.  

We have clients who do not include them as taxable income and we have clients that do, click here to read an article by the legal lobbyist for the incentive industry to get an overview of the IRS rulings.  With this information you will be able to determine for yourself whether you want to implement a taxable program, or one that is non taxable.  

Just remember not to pay too much attention to the rhetoric of some companies who would

have you believe that their programs are not taxable and therefore less expensive.  Actually nothing could be further from the truth.  With the ridiculous pricing they use for their merchandise awards, your program may be costing you more and your employees receiving less in value for the same budget dollars.


We will be happy to show you the comparison of taxable and non taxable award systems, that will give you more information to make an educated decision on what's right for you.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Why Communications Are Key In Safety Incentive Programs

Thorough and well-structured safety incentive programs provide a great way to effectively communicate your safety culture.  They can communicate the commitment to continuous improvements to safety performance, and most importantly to each individual in your organization, who keeps and is dedicated to one another’s safety on-and-off-the-job!  

For a white paper that discusses the importance of communications in your safety award system, please click here.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Millennials Love Gift Cards

If you want to motivate or recognize the safety performance of millennials, give them a choice of gift cards. 

Recent research conducted by NPD Group and the Wharton School finds that gift cards are particularly popular with the younger generation.  It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that this group is “wired”, they grew up online, are connected always through various devices, and when they shop they prefer to use gift cards, and specifically electronic gift cards.

While various groups can agree or disagree on traditional vs electronic gift cards, in general, many of the younger age groups, and even many Boomers, prefer general purpose bank cards vs specific store cards because they can be used almost anywhere.  Unfortunately, from the perspective of a buyer of employee recognition programs, these bank cards can charge purchase fees from $3.95 to $6.95 per card.  And, as the vast majority of gift cards used in safety incentive programs are valued at $25, these fees can amount to an additional 15% to 30% added to your budget.

When faced with this choice, buyers often consider using one of several gift card solutions that are available in the incentive industry.  These solutions allow them to award one card or certificate that can then be redeemed for large array of popular gift cards.  Many of these solutions also contain a fee per card, or other fees raising your budget.

There is one safety award system that does not charge any outward or hidden fees...the On The Spot safety award.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

OSHA Regulations & Safety Incentive Programs

With the recent OSHA regulations on reporting, there is again much discussion on safety incentives and how they are viewed by OSHA.  Clients and prospective customers ask about it almost daily.  Since the first OSHA report on safety incentives was published in 1998, we have read and researched many articles on this subject and rarely find anything written on it from the point of view of a safety award company.

So we reviewed all current research, had conferences with our panel of safety professionals across the country, and have written a paper that we feel will give you a better understanding of this discussion.

The paper is intended to be as transparent as possible regarding the subject; the opinions contained in it are based on reviewing hundreds of safety incentive programs that our clients have implemented over the years.  And from our perspective, at least 50% of all the programs reviewed contain at least some rules that can easily be considered by OSHA to be the kind that could cause the under reporting of incidents, and therefore place them in jeopardy of non-compliance.

In reality, we can recall only a small handful that were ever audited and were told they were not compliant. The white paper goes into detail how this happened, and how the incentive industry, while being complicit, was actually doing what they were trained to do. 

Today with the spotlight squarely on the OSHA reporting rules that were recently introduced, we believe that now is a great time to take a close look at your incentive programs and do what you need to do to make them compliant.

Please click here for this whitepaper.  It will provide you with the issues surrounding this subject, and ways to help you plan for better more productive safety incentive programs, please click here.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services please contact us here.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Gift Card Safety Awards Compared to Cash

Every year Incentive magazine conducts their “Gift Card IQ” research.  One of the questions surveyed was how effective gift cards are compared to cash.

Following is a recap of that research and a comparison of those same questions to 2015.

Question	2016	2015
Gift Cards are More Effective than Cash	40.6%	33.9%
Gift Cards are Equally Effective as Cash	34.3%	40.3%
Gift Cards are Less Effective than Cash	9.8%	3.4%
Do Not Use Cash Rewards	15.3%	22.4%

There was a time, not so long ago that cash was considered king in the recognition and employee engagement field.  Today it is almost non-existent.

If you are sourcing your own gifts cards for your safety recognition programs and want to view a gift card system that was designed by the help of safety professionals for safety incentives, has $ for $ pricing with NO FEE and allows your participant to redeem for over 500 of the most popular brands of gift cards in the country, please let us know.

Here's just a few of the over 500 gift card brands in our award systems. Click here for a complete list of cards.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

  

Comparing OSHA Safety Incentive Regs. To Wells Fargo High Pressure Sales

What does Wells Fargo’s trouble with their high pressure sales programs, have to do OSHA regulations on safety incentive programs? 

They are both about incentive programs that have gone wrong!

Wells Fargo, used controversial sales goals, and then proceeded to use high pressure sales tactics with their employees to meet these goals.  It is estimated that because of this poor incentive planning that 5300 employees lost their jobs and Wells Fargo has subsequently been fined $185 million.

OSHA has for over fifteen years been warning the safety world not to create safety incentives that puts pressure on employees not to report incidents of accidents.  But there have been programs that did, and most likely still are.  While researching a client’s past safety incentives to ensure compliance an employee in confidence made the following remark: 

“It's only common sense, isn't it, that when you put so much pressure on a person to not have an injury, and show them the valuable awards they can receive if they do, that they'll be motivated to conceal it if they can”!

Neither sales incentives, nor safety incentives are inherently bad business strategies as attested by the tens of thousands of organizations of all sizes which have successfully implemented similar programs.  They all run the risk of being counter-productive or unethical behavior.  But you can’t blame speeding on the car; you have to blame it on the driver.

In our opinion the ill-advised Wells Fargo sales program places a shining light on the need for experts to design any program that motivates people in business.

We have been implementing safety incentive programs for years and constantly recommend solutions that focus on all the things that workers can do in their work day to promote a safe culture and never on achieving an award AFTER the fact based on safety measures.  These solutions have never drawn the attention of OSHA, and in fact have been praised by them.

We have years of experience and huge body of knowledge gathered from hundreds of successful safety programs.  

We design programs based on sound research and accumulated best practices supported by common sense.  We incorporate values, communication, learning and feedback, as well as rewards & recognition, into safety incentives to ensure your employees are capable, inspired and clear on how their efforts can contribute to your success?

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

How to Translate Corporate Safety Goals to Your Employees

One of the biggest challenges for HS&E Managers and Supervisors is effectively translating corporate safety goals into workable safety programs at the front-line level. 

Throughout the years, numerous approaches have been applied to address this challenge.  Typically, these include corporate mandates, hazard recognition training to achieve minimal compliance and avoid formal investigations, posters / tee-shirts / caps with safety messages that ultimately are lost in “the landscape” of the day-to-day job sites, threats of losing one’s job, formal safety mission / vision / values statements, and the list goes on and on.

In order to properly assess and solve the challenges of in-the-field commitment to safety performance, let’s first look at what goes into sound corporate safety objectives.  For a short paper that highlights this subject and discusses a simple principle communicate it effectively, please click here.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

What’s the Best Safety Award to Use?

While this is not necessarily the most important question to consider when you want to implement a safety incentive program, it is a significant one. 

When selecting safety awards make sure that they appeal to the vast majority of your people.  Your program will have a much better chance for success when you do  Too often, safety planners don't take this into account.  Some safety professionals honestly feel that any award will do. While is true that any award is better than nothing, and you will get some motivation to work safely just by having a program that measures performance against a set of goals, the motivation will not be sustained unless what you are going to reward them with is something meaningful to the participants

In your planning phase:

• Do you use the awards that your award company wants to sell you?  
• Do you give your employees the award that you want them to have?
• Or do you ask your employees what award they want?  

As family involvement is extremely important to the success of any safety incentive campaign, do you choose awards that appeal to them? Remember that company identifiable clothing (tee shirts, hats etc.) have relatively little meaning for the family.  

Within reason, you should use the award that your employees really want, the one they would choose for themselves.

Click here if you would like to see a white paper on this subject.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

The Benefit of True Choice in Safety Awards

Will the traditional merchandise and company logo wearables used to award safety sensitive employees in the past be effective in motivating and recognizing employees in today’s diverse workplace?

The Award of Choice card and On The Spot Safety Award card were developed by professionals in the safety industry to provide the broadest selection of merchants within a gift card program.  When you offer employees their choice of awards, they work harder to achieve your goals.  When the award is something that is personally meaningful to them and when...

 their families can participate in the award redemption process, YOUR program safety objectives become THEIR safety objectives.

Sometimes it’s just that simple; we don’t try to complicate it.

The Award of Choice program offers over 500 gift card brands!  See for yourself. 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

How Effective Are Gift Cards as Safety Awards?

According to recent research on gift cards published by Incentive Magazine 97.6% of all incentive users reporting felt that gift cards were effective, very effective or extremely effective.  Actual research results were:

The diversity of today’s workforce demands something different from the same traditional merchandise and logo company items that were used in safety programs for years. 

Total Effectiveness of Gift Cards as Employee Safety Awards	% of Responses
Effective	17.6%
Very Effective	48.85%
Extremely Effective	31.2%

By any measure, gift cards are the most effective safety award for two simple reasons:  

1. They provide the greatest choice and value for the award winner
2. Unquestionably they give the client the most cost effective means to recognize performance  

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net