Ban the Term “Safety Incentive” From Your Safety Culture

Take the term “safety incentive” out of your thought process when you’re considering any type of award to motivate your workforce to work safely. 

The primary objective of traditional safety incentive programs was to reduce accidents.  These programs were patterned after traditional sales programs that were designed to reward based on incremental sales achievement.  Early safety incentives were also designed this way because safety professionals didn’t want to pay out any type of reward unless and until they had a reduction in accidents. This of course this lead to the non-reporting issue that OSHA is so leery of today and the downfall of many “safety incentive” programs.

Does it really make sense to try to incentivize safety sensitive employees into being safe?  No one really comes to work thinking they will have an accident and it just seems counter intuitive to have a program that says don’t have an accident and we’ll give you an award.  But that’s just what the safety industry did for years.

From our perspective, if you are leaning toward rewarding your workers for performing their job functions in a safe manner; than by all means do so, but use the rewards to continuously and consistently reinforce safe behaviors. By actively recognizing safe performance wherever and whenever possible you are actually doing your best to increase safety awareness and stave off the complacency about hazards that can all too often exist. 

Obviously there are a number of contributing factors that have to be lined up just right for some unplanned accident to happen.  Look at consistent safe performance awards as ways to disrupt those factors.  They can make the difference between a near miss and a horrible accident. 

Like it or not, we all make mistakes.  Some of them get us hurt, but it is almost impossible to engineer all the jobs and performance tasks to such a degree that you will eliminate mistakes.  But you can form correct habits of performing those job functions in a safe manner….not by using safety incentives, but by rewarding safe performance when it happens.

Should it be “Safety Incentives” or “Award Safe Behaviors?”  Just semantics?  Maybe, but awarding safe behaviors is a much better way to communicate this important safety tool.

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