Customer Satisfaction and Employee Safety

You can’t achieve customer satisfaction goals without all employees working toward that goal.  When a company doesn’t provide quality customer service it is noticeable almost immediately and losing any customers is very harmful to your bottom line in a short space of time. 

Safety goals not achieved also affect the bottom line, often in a more disastrous way, but

aren’t really noticeable until it is too late.  Unfortunately, many objectives relating directly to the customer often get far more focus from management than objectives relating to safety. To achieve customer satisfaction it all gets down to employee engagement.  So too, you can’t achieve safety objectives on the job without employees being deeply involved in the process.   

Studies have found a positive relationship between employee engagement and organizational performance outcomes: employee retention, productivity, profitability, customer loyalty and safety.

The approach to building customer satisfaction is the same approach to build a successful safety culture.  You need management involvement, communication, awareness, training, measurement and recognition. Just as with employee recognition awards used in companies to build and reinforce overall employee engagement, rewards close the loop on the safety behavior model and allow management to send the message that these positive safety behaviors are effective and appreciated. 

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

Why Do We Still Have Safety Award Programs Based on Lagging Indicators?

OSHA has been very clear about their feelings on traditional safety incentives based on lagging indicators.  You would think by now with all the negative publicity and even the recent OSHA reporting rules that these programs would be extinct. Quite to the contrary, many still exist, and we get calls for them every week.

Clients still persist in implementing lagging indicator programs.  Why? Here are some reasons:

• They don’t want to pay for awards for safety improvement until they get the improvement.
• They aren’t fully convinced that awards paid to change behavior will actually result in a reduction in accidents and find difficulty in convincing financial management in approving the budgets.
• They look at safety awards as a short term fix to the problem, and once it’s solved, they stop the program, assuming the problem won’t return. 
• They don’t see awards as an opportunity to turn unsafe work practices into good safety habits that assist their overall safety efforts for the long term.
• Lagging indicator programs are far easier to implement than behavior change programs.  
• Behavior change requires continuous involvement and is far more time consuming to implement. 

These reasons may be oversimplifying it a bit, but there’s a lot of truth in them; especially with the time consuming restraints on safety professionals when implementing a well-designed safety award effort.

Budgets for safety training is a given, you can’t have a safe culture without teaching your workers how to be safe.  Budgets to close the behavior loop started with training and provide safety rewards as reinforcement for the behavior change is not a given.  But maybe it should be.

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

Safety Awards Are the Most Misunderstood Safety Strategy

Having been in the incentive industry for close to 40 years, we’ve designed, implemented, researched and analyzed many different types of incentive programs.  By far the most misunderstood of all of them is the “safety incentive.”

We follow a few safety groups on LinkedIn, and recently there were a couple of discussions on safety incentives and what the safety professionals thought of them. The answers are given based on the contributor’s experience of either being in a “safety incentive” or actually implementing one.  The answers ranged from completely negative feelings to negative feelings with some positive comments to positive feelings with negative comments to largely positive responses.  This topic elicits a tremendous response rate and everyone has an opinion.  Just the topic “safety incentives” seems to set folks off on a tangent.  It is always a lively debate, and the answers reflect precisely the title of this post.

Safety professionals are expert in the world of safety, but on average are not very well versed when it comes to “safety incentives”.  Why?  Well, to start, they don’t often understand the major differences between various award strategies: 

• Incentives programs as motivators of behavior change

• Simple communications programs that contain company identified merchandise that is used for rewards (tee shirts and caps

• Year ending programs that use the “award of day” or cash to reward for lagging indicators

• Other programs that are used to simply thank and recognize folks for performing in a safe manner during a set timeframe 

I suppose there are a lot of reasons why “safety incentives” are viewed with such inconsistency.  In our opinion the reason is the lack of understanding of what a “safety incentive” should be versus all the other award strategies that might be employed in its place.  When you put all the safety award strategies into the one generic name of “safety incentives,” all you do is compound the confusion.  “Safety incentives” are not inherently good or bad or right or wrong, they just are.  What you get out them is directly related to what you understand about them and how to use them.     

When you understand how award strategies work and when and how to use the different types of award systems to enhance a safety culture, you will have performance improvement programs that do work and work well.  The question should not be “what do you think about safety incentives in general” it should be what types of award strategies you have used, if they were successful and why, or if they were not successful and why.

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

Improving Safety Attitudes

Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, showed your attitude is a better predictor of your success than your IQ.  She found that people’s core attitudes fall into two categories; fixed mindset or growth mindset.  With a fixed mindset you believe you are who you are and cannot change.  With a growth mindset you believe you believe you can improve with effort.

We believe that almost all workers have a growth mindset when it comes to safety and believe that they can improve in that effort.  Can then attitude be taught?  Can you change attitudes?  Can you improve attitudes? Of course, it all starts with communications. Here is an article on communications within safety awards efforts that might be of interest. 

Once you have developed and implemented a communications plan, here are some other steps you might want to consider to build a positive safety attitude in your organization:

·       Utilize different methods of communications with regular updates on safety performance

·       Encourage safety suggestions that continuously and consistently drive the number, quality and implementation of suggestions.

·       Consider small rewards to employees who bring hazardous conditions to your attention and assist in correcting them

·       As safety training is paramount, consider closing the behavioral loop by measuring the effectiveness of your training and rewarding employees for improved performance based on that training.

·       Along with recognizing employees for ongoing safe behavior, use small tangible awards for maintaining safe behaviors and eliminating unsafe behaviors. 

·       Get your management involved. This may seem straightforward but it’s often the most difficult to do.  Give them something to do and keep them in front of the employees often to show support. 

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

A Caution About Safety Games

In the safety award systems we recommend and implement, we often suggest using some type of game element.  They are fun to use, can capture the short term attention of your workers, and almost everyone loves a game and likes to win.  They are somewhat easy to administer, are usually “all inclusive” and contain communications that are fun and catchy.  However there are some things you need to be aware of before you decide to implement one of the “all-inclusive ones you see in the marketplace.

If they contain a “group earning” rule, this can easily bring the element of non-reporting of incidents into your workplace because of the peer pressure workers can feel to not want to hurt the chances for their team to earn the “grand prize.”

These types of programs are rarely long term and difficult to sustain. They wear out their excitement rather quickly.  Your safety needs don’t wear out and you’re your often tasked with trying to come up with something new.

The “all inclusive” aspect makes it extremely difficult to determine the cost of your awards per person.  Some game companies say that their programs are non-taxable.  But the only way they can be is if 10% or less of your workers receives a meaningful award.  That’s just one simple IRS stipulation for being non-taxable.

It is rare for these companies to use anything other than merchandise items or trips as their awards.  This may be fine, but the pricing of these awards are always hidden in the “card” or “point” formula and you are usually paying prices for these awards substantially above a normal retail as they have to amortize the high print cost of the communications and other program material.

Gift cards are the single most popular award for safety award programs because they provide the greatest value and infinitely greater choice for your workers.  These companies do not want to use them because they greatly distort their pricing mechanism.  They don’t want you to know the price you are paying for the “toaster.”



So use some caution. Be careful when considering these types of games.  We’ve analyzed most of them and they haven’t changed their pricing structure in years.  There is no “free lunch.”

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