Eliminating Safety Reward Programs In Sales Downturns

There are sales and revenue downturns in every industry and every company.  It is rare for any company to have constant profit growth year to year, and when slumps exist executive and financial management look for ways to cut expenses.  When your budget contains a line item titled “safety incentive” executive can view it as “nice to have” rather than “need to have.” When that happens what does it say about the way upper management views your safety award system? 

We have recommended for some time that you take the word “incentive” out of your safety culture.  It’s not an incentive; it’s reinforcement after the fact and a valid tactic to be used within the proven effective behavior model to change bad safety habits into good ones.  Reducing or eliminating bad safety performance will reduce your overall cost of safety, and improve bottom line results.  In difficult economic times isn’t that exactly what you need to do?  If upper management wants to cut safety award programs in difficult times, why would they want to keep them in good economic times?  It’s not the economy that should drive your safety award efforts, it’s the safety performance. 

We have a great deal of respect for safety management who try to retain their safety award efforts.  They fight that battle because they know these award programs help to cement all the other pieces of your safety effort, the training, communications, measurement, reporting etc. and build a culture of safety success.  And it helps upper management understand and support these efforts. 

Unfortunately when you are in market slump executives have a very hard time drawing a straight line between the cost of safety awards on a short term basis and short term bottom line results.  But the use of safety awards as behavior change tactics are long term strategies.  It takes time to change behavior and when one behavior is changed, another can take its place. 

It is incumbent on safety management to assist top management in understanding the importance of a complete safety effort that includes awards. In the planning stage make sure your management understands these four simple questions: 

What objective(s) do you intend to achieve by implementing a safety award system? 

What metrics do you intend to use to measure the performance toward that objective?

What will be the bottom line result for the company when you achieve the objective?

What is the bottom line consequence if you don’t achieve the objective.

If management doesn’t concur with the answer to these questions, your program will be vulnerable in bad economic times and subject to the budget cutting.  Employee safety award programs need to be viewed as irrefutably producing results.  And then it’s the finance department helping safety management trying to save them from the axe.

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