Safety Award Tips for Frontline Supervisors

At the 2017 annual professional development conference for ASSE, Judy Agnew, PhD, Sr. VP for Aubrey Daniels International spoke in a session titled “Setting Frontline Supervisors Up for Success in Safety.”

Referring to frontline supervisors as “the linchpins of safety,” Agnew emphasized that creating a safe workplace requires active participation at all levels of the organization. Frontline supervisors, she said, play a key role in holding together the many moving parts of a safety program, from training and hazard identification to equipment inspections and recordkeeping.

In our opinion they play The Key Role in engaging your workforce.  They are on the spot

everyday making sure the employees contribute to a safer workplace by participating in safety discussions, planning for and anticipating hazards, actively working to keep peers safe, reporting hazards and near misses, and challenging decisions when appropriate.

And importantly, if you have any kind of behavior based award system, they are the ones most likely to be making the observations and issuing the small recognition awards so necessary to help turn that behavior into a habit. 

They are your safety coaches that deliver constructive feedback with a focus on helping people improve.  This coaching mindset leads to more positive interactions with frontline employees, which in turn facilitates engagement.

Encourage your supervisors to get to know their personnel asking for feedback and input rather than telling subordinates what to do; to use positive communications whenever possible; to promptly address issues raised by their employees, especially hazards; to focus on behaviors that with the highest hazard potential; and to have daily safety interactions that are specific and sincere.

And remember, when you recognizing and rewarding safe behavior, don’t forget to include all you safety supervisors as well.  Don’t assume that the higher pay is all they need for their efforts.  Recognition and reward strategies will be as effective with them as with all employees, maybe more so. 

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

Stop Focusing on Safety Results

Thankfully, almost all discussions these days on safety awards concern motivating safe behaviors and focus on changing conditions that can influence future accidents and injuries.  In fact a well-designed safety award system won’t even focus on the results other than to point toward what can happen when your entire workforce is performing their job functions in a safe manner. 

In a safety summit we attended earlier in the year, a speaker presented a wonderful analogy of how to view your safety culture in relation to the results you want to achieve. It is also a great way to explain leading vs lagging indicators and how to leverage leading indicators to promote a safety culture. His comparison used an example of a football game. Allow us to paraphrase from our memory:

Picture a football game.  When you watch it you focus on the field, on the ebb and flow of the players, the offense and defensive play calling and how the other team reacts to that positioning, down and distance, the field conditions, the weather, etc.  He mentioned that everything that was happening or was influencing the play made up all the leading indicators of the future results that you want.  If you are going to have a good chance to win, the teams and the coaches must continuously adjust their strategies based on all of these factors.

The scoreboard, on the other hand, shows us all the lagging indicators, such as the number of points scored during the game, how many yards were gained or lost in the last play etc. Once points are on the board, they're not coming off. Once the clock runs out, the teams (usually) can’t do anything to change the score.  If you spend all of your time fixated on the score, you won’t be able to manage the game.

The same applies to a safety culture.  The analogy helps us understand why safety programs cannot be driven by lagging indicators.  After the game you can look at the scoreboard and in retrospect say you should have done this or that differently, but it won’t change the outcome. 

But before and during the game you can have your “hazard radar” as well as all the necessary training, communications and behavior based award efforts in place and be in the position to adjust your strategy and control the outcome.

So stop focusing on safety results and focus on and monitor those leading indicators to safe performance.  This is the best way to bring about the behavioral changes that will naturally result in an improvement in lagging indicator performance and a win for your team. 

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

The Truth about Safety Incentives - My How Things Have Changed

We were going through some back issues of safety publications the other day and came across an article from EHS Today that we thought was interesting and worth a revisit.  The article is a little over 10 years old, and is a good example of how safety incentives were viewed at that time.  But in our experience of having implemented hundreds of safety award systems in many different industries, this article has very little to do with the thought process that goes into the safety award programs of today.

The article divides safety professionals into two camps, one that says employees will not be safe unless we give them incentives to do so and the other that incentives should not be needed for them to work safely.  Those debates may have existed ten years ago, but today they are frankly a little silly.  First most safety professionals realize that you can’t “incentivize safety.  And that if you are using safety awards at all, they should be used to reinforce positive safety behaviors of all the things you know they should be doing.    

Safety award systems are not the problem, the problem is not knowing how to use awards properly to reinforce behavior change. We hope the days are over when a program is implemented that focuses on a reward rather than the behavior.  We hope that the days when you might put a brand new wide screen TV in the break room and tell the workers that anyone who didn’t have an accident that quarter would get the chance to win it in the “Super Tuesday Sweepstakes of the Moment.”

Safety awards should be part and parcel of your entire safety culture.  They’re not entitlements, they are not routine unless you call continuously reinforcing good behavior routine, they are certainly never punitive because you should never have a team based incentive in the first place, and they are by no means irrelevant as they speak to the heart of what every safety professional wants their employees to do. 

Frankly the article is demeaning to assert that safety professionals would have used safety awards to “buy your employees commitment to safety with an incentive program.”  In the hundreds and hundreds of safety award initiatives we’ve implemented we’ve never seen any who would even consider that.  They don’t. Safety is too serious a subject for them. 

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

Does Your Executive Management Prioritize Productivity Over Safety?

A recent survey by the National Safety Council found that 58% of workers in the construction industry feel that safety takes a backseat to production in completing job tasks.  In addition, 51% report that management does only the minimum required by law to keep employees safe, and 47 percent say employees are afraid to report unsafe working conditions.

4,836 people died in workplace incidents in 2015, and 937 of those killed were construction workers.  With all that has been said and done by OSHA to make sure that workers feel secure in reporting unsafe behaviors, the 47%, or any % for that matter, should be very disturbing. 

In contrast to the construction industry the report showed that only 36% of those employees

surveyed in fourteen other industries felt that their employers prioritize productivity over safety.  Nonetheless, 36% is overwhelming when you consider the comparison of choosing productivity to drive bottom line profits to potentially serious accidents or even death.  Obviously one doesn’t necessarily cause the other, but the potential is clearly higher when the concentration is on productivity.

As we spend most of our working day consulting with safety professionals about programs to reduce unsafe behavior and report unsafe conditions, our first impression was to question the above numbers.  We can’t remember the last time a safety professional told us that his executive management was more concerned about profits than safety, at least not to the extent of 50%!  Only you can speak for your own operation.

Other questions and responses from the survey that may be of interest include:

32% say management ignores safety performance when determining promotions.

62% feel that everyone is involved in solving job safety issues.

63% feel hey work in areas ergonomically correct.

48% believe safety meetings are held less often than they should be.

47% believe performance standards are higher for productivity than for safety 

33% do not feel that management has a written policy expressing attitudes about employee safety.

One thing is for sure, before you embark on any program to motivate safe behavior you might want to survey your own employees on some of these questions.  The results will certainly help you when you begin to design your own safety award system.

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

Are Merchandise Safety Awards Overpriced?

If you compare what companies pay for traditional safety incentive merchandise items with those same items at retail the answer is emphatically....YES!  The problem is that the people who receive the value of these awards...your employees, are rarely if ever the same people who purchase them.  They often don’t see the price or value because they are hidden in “points” or “award levels” or other schemes.  For example, a company issues you a safety award and tells you to pick an item from a booklet or grouping of awards.  You have no idea of what your company paid for that award.   Although you do have an idea of what the award is worth. 

Frankly any employee can easily find out what an item is worth by quickly browsing the internet and reviewing any of the many shopping sites, the most prominent of which is Amazon.com.  If the actual cost of the award ever does come to light, and it often does, employees start to question why their company paid so much for the safety award.  Then the questions start...can I get a gift card for the same price you paid for the safety award?  This is probably the main reason why gift cards have jumped to the top of the list of most used recognition and incentive awards...because of their value.

The rewards industry has argued long and hard that they have value as consultative suppliers and view that value should be part of the price of the merchandise.  If they are a value, why not just charge for that service and provide the merchandise at a more competitive price? That way it won’t hurt the employee.

From our perspective in looking at this situation for over 35 years, we believe that even the most novice buyer would have to see that they are paying more than retail for the merchandise.  The question is how much more than retail, and is there a value in the infrastructure provided by the supplier sufficient enough to offset the higher price?  Research by the Incentive Foundation clearly states that nearly 80% of the client respondents didn’t use outside incentive companies for anything other than for fulfillment of the award.  That would seem to indicate that a buyer shouldn’t pay anything more than retail if the vendor is not providing any other service. 

Ask yourself this question.  Shouldn’t your employee receive as much of the value of your safety award budget as possible?  If you have $25, or $50 or $100 or more to reward an employee, shouldn’t they receive a choice of a safety award that approximates that value?   Unfortunately, that is usually not the case when traditional merchandise is the offered safety reward.  We have done extensive research and analysis and can confidently say that the standard cost for the traditional safety award merchandise used in this industry is, on average; 50% HIGHER THAN RETAIL.  We won’t argue here what “Retail” really is, but suffice it to say that with the advent of the internet, retail is easily determined by what the employee perceives it to be.  While they can understand fluctuation of pricing from one retailer to another, swings of up to 50% are deemed unacceptable. 

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