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. 

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