Where Team Safety Awards Make Sense

Do your frontline workers connect your corporate safety goals to their own behavior?  If truth be known, probably not.  We doubt if they come to work every day concerned about the related costs of workers comp claims or the increases in healthcare costs due to incidents of accidents, or the impact on the bottom line due to lost time accidents and added labor costs.  That worry belongs to EHS and other executive management.  These macro goals are rarely shared with rank and file who are in the trenches everyday doing what they do best.

In some respects the traditional safety incentive programs that rewarded individuals based on these lagging indicators made it much easier to direct employee attention to them.  The programs were simple….don’t get into an accident and win a prize.  Unfortunately these programs spent millions in awards cost and the company got relatively nothing for the expense.  The workers got the awards because they were lucky enough not to have had an accident during the program period. It had nothing to do with changing poor safety behaviors and turning the positive behaviors into habits.  And, these programs did in fact create the problem of the non-reporting of accidents…thus the crack down by OSHA on “safety incentives.”

If you want employees to understand the correlation between safety behaviors, and the overall financial performance of your organization, you must communicate it. You need to connect the dots how their own safe behaviors relate to decreased incidents which in turn in the aggregate achieve your overall goals.  Individuals want to be able to relate their personal safety behaviors to the corporate goals.  No one works in a vacuum, and everyone can have a sense of pride in reducing accidents.

The best team based safety award program to use is one that works with ongoing communications to emphasize the objectives and provides feedback to the team as a whole of how well they are performing.  Then at the end of whatever cycle you are working with (quarterly, semi-annual or annually) you can have some kind of recognition ceremony and issue to the entire team some kind of tangible recognition award.  This award should not be promoted as a motivator, it is given after the fact as a “Thank You.”

When this linkage and understanding is clear, your coworkers actively and aggressively seek ways to continuously improve their safety behaviors, performance, and company outcomes.  Appreciating and tangibly recognizing your coworkers for doing so is one of the keys to improving and sustaining safety performance and positive outcomes for all!

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

Do Safety Awards Really Produce Results?

Over the years there have been at least two schools of thought voiced to us by safety professional on the subject question:

1. We pay our people to function in a safe manner and get the results the company wants.  They are already paid to work safe. 

2. Tangibly appreciating and recognizing individual behaviors that improve specific safety performance and outcomes have a measurable and dramatic impact on the overall safety and financial performance of a company.

 We have never seen empirical research stating accurately that safety incentives produce results. Frankly we don’t feel that you ever will.  Simply because as we have stated many times, that you can’t incentivize safety.  That would be the same as asking if employee rewards really produces a positive change in employee engagement.  You can’t incentivize that either, because there are way too many pieces to either of those puzzles and they all have to be working in tandem to be effective

We do know that you can change poor safety behavior and replace it with positive safety behavior by using rewards as positive consequences for making the change.  We do know that the reward industry in a wide ranging research project showed…

A small, positive, immediate consequence has more impact

on behavior than a large, future and uncertain one.

And

By consistently and continuously reinforcing behavior

change with small amounts of awards, you will change behavior

Stop looking at safety incentives to achieve the lagging safety goals traditionally used for safety incentive programs and substitute it with a a safety award system to recognize continuous safety improvement

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

The Absence of Accidents or the Presence of Safety?

For a little levity, take a look at this short clip about a safety pizza party brought to you by Madtv.  https://youtu.be/rK8UIGkzsf8

It’s fun to watch for those of us who have been involved with safety incentives for years.  But it does bring up a point we have been preaching for a long time.  A great safety culture is not about the absence of accidents, it’s about the presence of safety. 

In over 30 years of implementing safety incentive systems, we’ve seen hundreds of safety incentives just like the one you saw in the skit.  Regardless of OSHA coming down hard on safety incentives based on lagging indicators that do nothing to foster safe behavior, $$ millions are spent each year on safety awards that do just that.

An example in the extreme that too poignantly magnifies this problem is the April 20, 2010 disaster that occurred on the BP Horizon oil rig where 11 men died from one of the worst safety disasters in history.  Prior to the accident, this rig had a perfect safety record for seven years running! Did you know that after analysis of the accident it was reported that over 400 maintenance items had not been corrected, and two of them could have given the workers more time to leave the rig and may have prevented some of the deaths?

Having signs that count the number of days without an accident, and dinners or pizza parties or tee shirts may be great ways to communicate the need for safety and even to thank your workers for being safe, and they are perfectly legitimate ways to foster a safe environment.  But they don’t change behavior? Or merely promote the absence of accidents?

If you want real behavior change you need to continuously observe and recognize safe performance.  Only then will that performance turn into a safe habit.

One Word to Capture All Your Safety needs?

Note:The idea for the title and context in this blog come from the book “One Word that will Change Your Life,” written by John Gordon, Dan Britton and Jimmy Page.  

If you could think of one word that would encompass every aspect of your safety program (and culture) what would it be? If you’re looking for an answer here, you won’t find it.  But what may interest you is applying the process contained in the book mentioned above to the safety challenges you face today.  Here is the process

To begin, follow two simple steps: one unplug…find a place with no distractions so you can look inwardly as to what your One Word is going to be.  Two ask yourself the following three questions:

1. What does our safety program truly need?  Almost everyone in management wants fewer injuries, but this may not be what they need.  Focus on the safety needs as you see them today in your organization.

2. What is in your way?  Seek insights from your safety pro colleagues and your frontline workers to determine those things that stand in your way of a safety success. 

3. What needs to go?  If the same results are occurring using a number of historic activities, some may need to be replaced or discontinued all together to bring about the change that you need.

Oftentimes we get fixated on a numeric goal and never focus on what the people in the organization could potentially become. We tend to over-complicate and over-explain what employees must do to meet these goals. People do not remember paragraphs or sentences from one day to the next. Why not consider an approach that your safety sensitive employees might remember all year long and work to live by — adopt the “One Word” approach

The One Safety Word approach can work. You may experience a transformation in the safety potential of your organization, not just go through the motions of the same safety program you implemented several years ago.

And when you’ve used your word for a year, don’t carry it over to the next year.  Start the process again and bring in the New Year with a New Word. 

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

Customizable Gift Cards for Safety Awards

Have you ever purchased a customizable computer?  You may have decided to simplify your decision making process by opting for a popular brand with all the features you thought you needed. But the decision making process did not stop there, as you now had to customize your model by choosing from different product attributes (processing speed, hard drive capacity, screen size, etc.)

There are more gift cards used as safety awards than any other type of award.  The more

you can customize the presentation of the gift cards to match your specific safety award system, the more effective it will be.  Most users of safety awards will source only one or a handful of gift cards to issue to employees for safe work performance.  But there are some award companies that provide hundreds of gift card options for your employees.  These gift card systems have a great deal of flexibility and will free up your time and be very cost effective. 

You can find these systems online with a simple search. We would encourage you to compare what you find with our system, found on the pages of this blog.  If you would like us to do a comparison for you at no cost, just send us the vendor and we’ll be happy to help.

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