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.

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