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