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