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