Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Painting Safety Incentives with a Broad Brush


All safety professionals have an opinion on safety incentives.  Many don’t believe in them; some find that they can be very helpful in within the designs of their overall safety culture and others have simply given up on them because of the OSHA recording issues and non-reporting of incidents concerns.

Having been involved in safety award systems for many years, we have seen a definite shift in how they are being used.  At one time almost all safety incentives were based on lagging indicators and some did have incident reporting issues, but far less than perceived.  Most safety professionals wouldn’t allow that.  Unfortunately over the last few years the term “safety incentive” became painted with a broad negative brush and many companies stopped using them.

A while back, there was an interesting quote by Dr. Deb Potter from an article from the Safety Daily Advisor.  She mentioned that the problem with safety incentives is that they don’t work the way they are expected to.  Wrong, they work exactly the way they were designed but they were designed by an incentive industry that was steeped in sales incentives, not in awards to change workers behavior to work safely.

Safety awards have a very important place in any safety culture, but in our opinion, the first thing you need to do is change the name.  They aren’t incentives at all; they are reinforcement recognition for positive behavior performance.  They should be used on a continuous and consistent basis to change bad safety performance.  They are reasons for you to acknowledge and thank your employees on the spot for performing all tasks in a safe manner. 


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