Tuesday, November 21, 2017

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. 
  1. 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


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