Employee Engagement Can Produce Fewer Safety Incidents

Over the last few years there has been a lot written on Employee Engagement.  It has become the large cauldron that contains everything you ever wanted to know about how to engage your employees, make them perform better, have better attitudes etc.  Gallup’s most recent State of the American Workplace report paints a fairly clear picture that employee engagement is working.  By looking at the results of this study, it is apparent that it works.  What it doesn’t really show is what exactly is employee engagement in the first place and how exactly is it measured.  There seems to be differences of opinion on that.

Regardless, Gallup states that compared to organizations with lower levels of employee engagement, those with higher levels of engagement typically experience:

• 41% lower absenteeism
• 24% lower turnover (high turnover industries)
• 59% lower turnover (low turnover industries)
• 28% less shrinkage
• 70% fewer employee safety incidents
• 58% fewer patient safety incidents
• 40% fewer quality incidents (defects)
• 17% higher productivity
• 20% higher sales
• 21% higher profitability

If the above numbers are correct, and you really do know how to improve employee engagement, it should form a base for any safety culture. 

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

Best Practices for Building Effective Relationships around Safety

According the Judy Agnew, Ph.D. a senior vice president of ADI, to ensure the best possible results for your safety initiatives, you need to have effective relationships between management and employees.  For that to occur, there are several important things that management can do.  Following are some of these:

• Make expectations extremely clear, don’t leave room for assumptions

• Learn to be an active listener, using the skills necessary to do so.

• Take the time to acknowledge positive safety performance, not just mistakes or errors

• Engage employees with questions to understand problems and issues don’t just jump to conclusions.  Good questions uncover details, there are two sides to every story

• Ask your direct reports to give you feedback on your own effectiveness and areas that you can improve on. Admit when you make mistakes, and learning from them.

• Avoid blame wherever possible. What people do makes sense to them even if it doesn’t make sense to you.  Try to find out what lead to the undesired behavior

• Respond fairly to incidents, safety and other wise.

• You build respect with your direct reports when you solicit their opinions and input

• Follow through…do what you say you will do

• Stand up for your direct reports, verbally promote them and share their success with others, and if they make mistakes acknowledge some responsibility

• Your main objective is to help your employees become successful.  Find out what gets in their way and remove it if possible

• Use direct pinpointed feedback and do it just in time. 

• Trust your employees, give them responsibilities and avoid micromanaging them.

• Treat your employees like people, showing interest in their lives with concern and consideration Make expectations extremely clear, don’t leave room for assumptions

• Learn to be an active listener, using the skills necessary to do so.

• Take the time to acknowledge positive safety performance, not just mistakes or errors

• Engage employees with questions to understand problems and issues don’t just jump to conclusions.  Good questions uncover details, there are two sides to every story

• Ask your direct reports to give you feedback on your own effectiveness and areas that you can improve on. Admit when you make mistakes, and learning from them.

• Avoid blame wherever possible. What people do makes sense to them even if it doesn’t make sense to you.  Try to find out what lead to the undesired behavior

• Respond fairly to incidents, safety and other wise.

• You build respect with your direct reports when you solicit their opinions and input

• Follow through…do what you say you will do

• Stand up for your direct reports, verbally promote them and share their success with others, and if they make mistakes acknowledge some responsibility

• Your main objective is to help your employees become successful.  Find out what gets in their way and remove it if possible

• Use direct pinpointed feedback and do it just in time. That it the most effective

• Trust your employees, give them responsibilities and avoid micromanaging them.

• Treat your employees like people, showing interest in their lives with concern and consideration

These skills based on negotiation, flexibility and good will rather than coercion are well worth developing if you want to create relationships that result in a trusting and thus high-performance safety culture.

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

Why Relationships Matter in Safety

Following is a synopsis of an interesting blog post written by Judy Agnew Ph.D., senior vice president of Aubrey Daniels International, who works closely with clients to strengthen sustainable safety cultures.  She maintains that a solid safety culture starts with good relationships between employees and management. 

From a behaviorist’s perspective, safety is fundamentally a behavioral issue.  And as such, the only way to change or improve behavior is to use a process grounded in the science of behavior.   That process has to start with a positive and trusting working relationship between employee and management.  To go beyond the basics compliance requirements of a safety process, it boils down to the discretionary effort of the employees.  Exceptional safety happens when employees are in lock step with management.  Unfortunately you won’t get this kind of discretionary effort when employees dislike, distrust or worse, fear the boss.

According to Agnew:

Discretionary effort is created through the use of positive reinforcement. Research shows that when people are recognized for what they do well around safety and when reporting problems and concerns is met with reinforcing consequences (such as joint problem solving and problem resolution), employees will be more engaged in safety.

Within the post you can see a list of behaviors that contribute to positive workplace relationship.  They can be exhibited by any worker type and will lead to improved work in general.

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

The Truth About Building Safety Habits

We have long been a proponent of using continuous diminimous awards within BBS as positive reinforcement to change safe performance into habits.  Following is a post on Aubrey Daniels International by Tim Nolan, Ph.D., a trusted advisor to business and organizational leaders. This post gives you some reasons from a psychological perspective of we feel that BBS awards can be so effective.  We hope you find it informative.

The Truth About Building Habits: No You Don't Have to Do This Forever

Many times in the course of working with clients, they hit a point of realization about using a scientific approach to behavior on the job, and it sometimes sounds like this: “You mean I have to do THIS for EVERY behavior?”  The short answer is yes and no. Let me explain.

The answer is yes in that using a scientific approach to manage behavior is simply a more precise way of doing what most leaders spend their time doing anyway. As long as any of us are in the business of dealing with the behavior of others (which is most people in the workplace today), then we will be doing some version of THIS. Applying behavioral tools like pinpointing, shaping, feedback and positive reinforcement are simply more precise and deliberate ways of doing what leaders, managers, teachers, coaches, parents, etc., are doing in the course of their everyday interactions.

The answer is also no in the sense that not every behavior requires the same level of attention and even the ones that do, don’t require that attention forever. The value of pinpointing is that it helps narrow the vast universe of behaviors that are occurring all the time, down to a few that are mission-critical for some result or outcome we are trying achieve.

Even when focused on just a few key behaviors, it’s not necessary to stay focused on them forever. The intent in focusing on those behaviors is to turn them into habits that reliably occur with little or no additional attention from anyone.  Once those habits have formed, they are maintained by naturally occurring prompts, reminders and consequences in the workplace or in your environment.  Those behaviors become part of the culture or just how we do things here.

In a more technical sense, when we target a few pinpointed behaviors we are arranging planned antecedents and consequences to initiate and maintain a desired frequency for each behavior. As that behavior reaches a desired, reliable frequency or specificity, other naturally occurring antecedents and consequences begin to take hold and maintain that behavior. When that happens we tend to say that a habit has formed.

A simple example is wearing a seatbelt while driving or riding in a car. The first few times in a car, the act of fastening a seat belt isn’t natural or particularly comfortable. But antecedents or prompts (e.g., seat belt chime from car, reminders from other people), will result in people fastening it. The feel of the belt on the body, the sound of the click as it fastens, the termination of the chime function—are all forms of consequences.  Over time, this pattern of antecedents and consequences becomes fairly routine, to the point where driving or riding in a car without a seatbelt feels awkward or uncomfortable. The bottom line: seatbelt wearing has become a habit that no longer relies on instructions, laws, public service announcements, etc., to be maintained.

The important thing about habits is that they tend to stick with almost no additional effort on anyone’s part.  They simply become how you do things.  So in that sense the answer is no, you don’t have to do this forever. You only have to do this until you have turned pinpoints into habits.

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

eSafety Awards for eLearning Safety Systems

In our last blog post we discussed The Forgetting Curve and how the value of billions of safety training dollars are at stake if you don’t reinforce that training with more training. 

We also mentioned that more training was not the only alternative to reinforcing safety training and that small safety awareness awards can be just as effective and often more cost effective as well.

One of these alternative safety award alternatives is the e-gift card.  Now with just a few clicks at your desk or from the field on your laptop or from your iPhone you can give an employee who performed a trained safety function in the proper manner an instant e-gift card.  The codes for these e-gift cards can be purchased and stored for immediate use, so you can give them instantly.  Your employee can then use them immediately online to redeem for an item from that store.

To provide even more motivation, there are some gift card award companies, like the
Award of Choice, that can provide codes that can be redeemed for over 100 of the most popular brands in the country.  This saves you the trouble of trying to determine which gift card brand to use.  An added benefit is that these Award of Choice cards can be purchased without a fee, a dollar-for-dollar value.

The next time you think about doing more training as a reinforcement strategy for training, consider using small BBS awards instead.  You’ll get the added benefit of turning the training into habits, which is in effect a 100% retention strategy.

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

Employees Forget 70% of Safety Training Within 24 Hours!

Hermann Ebbinghaus a noted German psychologist, who pioneered early studies in memory, discovered that from the point when you learn a piece of information (100% retention), retention begins to drop exponentially. He called this the “Forgetting Curve”. What that means is, without follow-up, about 70% of learning is lost and forgotten within 24 hours of learning it.

In addition, while the loss rate does slow down, some studies show that total retention a month later is only around 10-20 %!  And that of course assumes the 100% of the learning is retained initially which is likely not the case. On a good day, we are lucky if a learner starts at 80% retention.

Over the years, psychologists have completed many experiments in the field of cognitive psychology, but researchers have not been able to replicate Ebbinghaus’ work.  The forgetting curve has stood the test of time. It is now relied upon as a sound concept.

So, does this mean that 70% of the billions spent each year on safety training is wasted after 24 hours? 

There will continue to be conflicting claims about what the forgetting curve actually is, how quickly people forget, and what trainers can do about it. You often hear safety training companies cite ‘the curve’ as the reason you need their product or service as reinforcement to the initial training or you risk losing training those safety investment dollars.

Despite the confusion, you can’t afford to ignore the forgetting curve. When lack of retention is properly planned for, it becomes another design issue. But when we pretend forgetting won’t happen or assume forgetting doesn’t matter; it will become a value killer.

Training reinforcement strategies can be more than just more training which would turn into a constant process of more training in order to enhance retention…it would never end.  Another suitable and successful alternative would be to turn the training into a habit (which is essentially repeated and retained learning.)  Doing this requires using the entire behavioral model….the training, the communications, the feedback, and the positive reinforcement….an award. 

Essentially, behavior based safety is a process to enhance the safety training that turns behaviors into habits.  When you apply continuous positive reinforcement to a training issue, you can build a habit and then go on to other important training issues. Historically small reinforcement safety awards are in fact nothing more than a training reinforcement strategy. 

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

Do Safety Incentives Really Produce Results?

Many safety managers ask a great question …

“Do safety incentives really produce results?”

There are at least two schools of thought on the answer voiced by safety managers:

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

Before you determine which answer is the right one for your organization, there are certain aspects you need to consider.  These are founded in the answer to the following key question and the criteria stated below …

A Key Question:

Does your organization actively measure, analyze, and broadcast safety performance and outcomes in terms of …

• The related costs of workers compensation claims.
• Healthcare costs increases or decreases due to incidents and accidents.
• The impact on operating expenses due to lost time and added labor costs.
• Is there a well-communicated and understood correlation between safety behaviors, performance, and the overall financial performance of your organization?
• Do all of the individuals in your organization relate their personal safety behaviors on-the-job and daily performance to the above four safety issues?

If the answer to the above is YES! … You are in a great position to measurably and expediently improve your safety behaviors, performance, and related outcomes by implementing a safety incentive program using a valuable safety appreciation and recognition system like Award of choice. A safety incentive program based on the above criteria will provide tangible appreciation and results based on measurable improvements … and these results can be significant! 

If the answer to the above is No, Not Sure, Sometimes,  A Little, or Maybe …you might want to consider postponing your award program and start first by making improvements to items as noted above!

Tangible Safety Incentive Programs Address and Go Beyond the Safety Behaviors Addressed by Basic Compensation Plans!

          In numerous studies the number one driver that motivates people to excel is Appreciation for a job well done! and Recognition for making and taking that extra effort!

A safety program can be a highly effective performance improvement tool by answering, addressing, and linking three critical elements in getting the job done!

1^st

Do the individuals clearly understand the defined safety goals and the impact their safety behaviors have on the required functional and financial outcomes of the company?

2^nd

Do the individuals understand how he / she links and is connected to the defined safety goals and the impact their safety behaviors have on the required functional and financial outcomes?

3^rd

Does she / he realize and live every day the fact that her / his day-to-day safety behaviors on-the-job directly affect the ability of the organization to achieve the defined safety goals and the impact their safety behaviors have on the required functional and financial outcomes … And, does she / he understand how her / his safety behaviors are critical to their individual and team’s overall well-being and future security?

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!

Experience shows that safety award systems have, do and will produce results!  But there is a caveat.  For your safety program to have the best chance at success it needs to be properly designed, implemented and communicated. 

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

Take the Subjectivity Out Of BBS Programs

As part of our ongoing program activity with our clients, we gather actual Leading Indicators that our clients use in their safety award systems.  The list that we have created is by no means meant to be an exhaustive combination of every possible leading indicator that have or can be used in BBS award systems.  It is designed to be a thought starter for indicators a company can use when they are considering moving from a traditional lagging indicator award system, “prize at the end”, to a program using safety awards to create safe behaviors and then turn them into habits. 

Our list is very simplistic when compared to H&S statistics and processes which cover data such as H&S tours, H&S meetings, training, induction, inspections, audits, drills etc. Those types of Objectively Verifiable Indicators (OVIs) are beyond our purview and allow clients to evaluate performance and identify gaps/malfunctions instantly.  But if you are going to move from one type of award structure to another, you need to start somewhere.

When you create OVIs in measurable and observable terms, they provide the basis for individual performance measurement suitable for project monitoring and evaluation.  They become the parameters of change or of results, indicating as to what extent the project objectives have been achieved.  They form the perfect structure from which to launch your award system and help your employees become successful in achieving results and earning awards.

Once you have achieved results in these OVIs, say for example over a six month period, it is then time for some new ones.  Don’t fall into the trap that everything is good, go find something that isn’t. 

The incentive industry has known for years that consistently and continuously rewarding behavior change with minimal awards will over the long run change behavior.  If you would like to see a paper on an award system that was designed for just these types of programs, we would be happy to send you an electronic copy.

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

The Relationship between Minor and Serious injuries

You can debate the validity of Heinrich’s accident ratios and numbers or the re-evaluation of them by Frank Bird in his Industrial Accident Prevention, but the bottom line in these discussions is that there are three important things we can learn from these powerful concepts:

First - there is a distinct mathematical relationship between incidents of similar type and how severe there are.  You can use technology to keep track of where your company is in relation to industry standards and even calculate this ratio for yourself. 

Second – it is not plant, equipment or location which accounts for the majority of safety incidents but employee behavior. 

Third – by reducing overall frequency of workplace injuries the number of severe or fatal injuries will consequently reduce.

Too Simplistic? 

Maybe, as there are scores of mathematicians and engineers out there who would love to delve deeply into these theories and discover the root causes of the minor injuries and deal with these then to uncover a proportionate effect on serious injuries. 

Ultimately the vast majority of underlying causes of minor and serious injuries have one thing in common: someone’s behavior. These may be the behaviors of operators, supervisors, managers or directors – or more likely a combination of all of these in a domino effect.

Sure, anyone can argue the validity of these models.  But they provide us with the very important point that by reporting near misses and minor injuries we can learn the lessons of why they occurred.  Most companies put too much focus on the top of the triangle (reactive) and not enough on the bottom (proactive).

As long as we don’t take these models too literally or get hung up on the numbers, they remain a very valuable safety tool.

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

Two Truths for Creating Most Effective Safety-Incentive Program

When your objective is to establish a safety culture that rewards active involvement by all employees in the effective execution of safety related practices, keep your safety awards simple.  Two truths about safety incentives will help you do just that.

A small, positive, immediate consequence has more impact on behavior than a large, future and uncertain one. By consistently and continuously reinforcing behavior change with small amounts of awards, you will change behavior

People do things for their own reasons and needs – not yours.  If you want to motivate change, then offer awards that appeal to those needs.  Within reason, let them have what they want, not what you think they want and not what you want them to have.

When you keep it simple you can achieve sustainable operational improvement in safety, environment, health and wellness and subsequently reduce costs.

Many companies are finding that gift card award systems are ideally suited to these small consistent types of awards because they are easy to administer, provide tremendous choice and are very cost effective. 

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

Creating Safety Habits

If you are trying to create safe work practices consider the following:

·       On average, an action becomes an "automatic" habit after 66 days of doing it

·       The subconscious mind rebels against big changes, but you can do it with gradual shifts

·       The more familiar a task is, the less scary it is. 

Incentive science has known for years that when you continuously and consistently reinforce behavior change with sincere appreciation and awards, you will change long term behavior.  It also teaches us that a small, positive, immediate consequence (the award) has more impact on behavior that a large, future and uncertain one.

Most safety award programs today aren’t effective in the long run.  You can spend a lot of money on employees for getting lucky for not having an accident during your program period, but they haven’t changed their behavior at all.  And that is very frustrating and the main reason many companies forego safety awards altogether.

Behavior based safety is based on the principle of creating habits and when efficiently implemented it can be very effective.

If you want to create new safety habits reinforce those positive behaviors whenever you see them.  The reinforcement doesn’t have to be an award of any tangible value; you can realize a great deal of change by simply recognizing and thanking your employees for the effort.  After repeating that recognition several times, you can then reinforce them with a small tangible award such as a gift card.

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

Do Away with Safety Raffles

Safety Raffles have been around since someone with limited funds decided to give an award to employees who performed safely on the job.  From a purely promotional standpoint they did get a lot of attention, but from a motivational standpoint they did little to incent behavior change.  In fact, raffles often brought about negative feeling among the participants for a variety of reasons. When the item raffled was of a significantly higher value, these negative feelings were magnified.  Examples:

You often see company pickup trucks raffled to the winning safety participants on a construction site.  It is fun for the one who wins, not so much for the 588 who didn’t.  How about when a very large trucking company put the names of any driver who did not have an accident that year in a hat and the winner got $1 million in cash.  There were close to 20,000 names in that hat. Do you really think they got any behavior change for that expense?  Just recently United Airlines tried something about as foolish to distribute limited bonus dollars to handful of employees via a lottery.  The HR dept. was pilloried because of it.

Safety raffle programs are used because the company doesn’t have the budget to implement an effective safety award system.  But it’s counter-productive. It gets no results and wastes the money anyway.  Our advice when you are considering any kind of raffle to motivate safe behavior is save your money.  All it really just becomes is an expensive safety communications tool.

The most successful behavior based safety programs recognize employees every time they perform in a safe manner.  Until now, there were no safety award systems that could provide this type of performance recognition and do it within normal budget parameters. 

The On the Spot award card has changed that.  It allows you to issue award cards for safety performance with low or no cost per card and still have a highly motivational program.

By offering a safety award system that uses a combination of winning cards redeemable for the most popular gift cards, and non-winning cards that help to reinforce behavior, you can do away with traditional sweepstakes or raffles that do little to change behavior.  How you combine these two cards depends solely on your budget requirements. 

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

Compare Open & Closed Loop Reward & Recognition Cards As Safety Awards

Companies purchasing gift cards for safety recognition or performance improvement often debate the advantages of purchasing and awarding open loop cards vs. closed loop gift cards.

Open loop payment cards are prepaid cards carrying the MasterCard, American Express, Discover, or Visa logo. These cards may be used like cash wherever credit cards are accepted.

Closed loop payment cards are those limited to a specific vendor and can only be spent at the merchant listed on the card. Starbucks and Amazon gift cards, for example, are “closed” because they are only accepted at those specific merchants. 

At first glance, it appears that open loop cards are the best solution as they offer the widest range of purchasing options.  But before you make that decision, consider these attributes:

• Often impose a per card fee above the face value – can be as much as $5.95 per card.  On smaller denominated ($25 or $50) this can amount to 10% to 12% additional cost.
• Often expire and/or decline in value after 6 or 12 months if full balance is not used;
• Often impose fees when the card is swiped, when you check your balance via customer service, and other situations included in the “fine print” on the card;
• Often result in a decline at the merchant location if cardholder does not know the exact balance and the merchant cannot tell the cardholder how much remains on the card;
• Can be confusing at checkout if the cardholder wants to use an additional method of payment for any outstanding balance on his/her purchase (i.e. a “split tender” transaction).
• In addition, older credit card processing terminals still handle gift cards as though they are credit cards – putting holds (or pre-authorization amounts) on the gift cards when they are first swiped. If the bank card does not have a balance to accommodate a pre-authorization swipe plus the final sale, a gift card might be declined.
• Closed loop merchant cards, while restricting the cardholder to a specific merchant, have no declining values and rarely impose expiration dates. In addition, the merchant can “read” the card and tell the cardholder the exact balance that remains.  

The user experience is usually much smoother with closed loop cards than with open loop.

How about a solution that offers the best of both worlds? Award of Choice gives each recipient the open loop flexibility of hundreds of merchants with the ease of closed loop gift card use. One Award of Choice opens the door to over 500 closed loop gift card brands including those that are requested most – WalMart, Target, Amazon, Starbucks, Best Buy, Costco, etc.  With no fees, no expirations, and no minimums, Award of Choice combines the best of closed loop and open loop cards -- offering hundreds of merchant choices, favorable economics, and a great user experience.

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

Feedback is the Most Critical Element of Your Safety Award Program

Feedback closes the loop on how to inspire safe behavior in your workforce and is arguably, the most important piece of the behavior model.

If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on communications, training and awards for your behavior change safety program, not bothering to include feedback would be like bowling with a curtain in front of the pins.

The right award system can reinforce behavior and improve the safety performance of your people.  The entire behavior change model is based on feedback which can both close and then reopen the loop to continue improving performance. 

Don’t forget the feedback.  It is often the least expensive thing to do and can provide the greatest motivation. 

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

Build it and They Will Come!

When you think about it, recognizing an employee for safe work behavior should be a simple (and happy) thing to do.   Throw out the complicated stuff and just tell your managers to simply recognize their employees for doing a good job whenever and wherever possible.  Measure the managers to make sure it gets done, and give them a budget to do it.  It’ll save you a lot of money and time and you’ll wind up with a much better safety program and more safety conscious employees.

Don’t incent safety; instead base your program on changing employee behavior and rewarding safe actions.  This will encourage that behavior to be repeated.  This simple approach will build a culture of safety which will reduce incidents.  The best approach to employee recognition is almost always the simplest one. 

One of the biggest problems with traditional safety incentive programs is that they are usually back end loaded and depend on a reduction of incidents of injuries or accidents before an employee will earn an award.  At that point, almost nothing has been done to influence the behavior of the individual to perform in a safe manner.  When they earn an award it is often because of luck, not because of cognitively trying to change their behaviors. 

Unfortunately for some managers it’s the “Field of Dreams” syndrome…build it and they will come.  Having analyzed hundreds of safety incentives we know that these back end award designs exist because some safety professionals have a difficult time convincing management to budget for safety awards on the front end.  They don’t mind spending money if they get the result.  They want the guarantee of cost savings before the lay out the cash for the award.  And frankly they want a program that is easy to implement.  Don’t have an accident – get a prize.  That is a very myopic approach to safety awards.

Unfortunately it is just this kind of program that OSHA does not condone because it’s just these kinds of programs that generate the need for employees to hide incidents of injuries so they can receive the award.  This is even worse when the program is designed around team performance. No one wants to let an incident be reported that will result in their team losing the award. 

So if you want a safety incentive program that will provide long term behavior change and take luck out of the equation…use the simple approach.  Recognize your workers for displaying positive safe behavior whenever you see it. 

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

Study Shows Cash Not Always a Good Employee Motivator

Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) and the Incentive Federation have conducted an long term audit of a wide variety of studies in various industries. The audit found that non-cash awards can actually capture an employee's imagination better than cash—thereby motivating them to increase performance.

A study conducted by the White Conference on Productivity some years ago that showed that it would take $3 in cash compensation to drive the same results as $1 in non-cash rewards.  Combining results from both this research should be particularly interesting to safety managers for at least three reasons: 

·       Almost all cash award programs are back end loaded (the awards are given at the end) based on reducing accidents and then receiving awards.   This is the type of program is a cause for the non-reporting of accidents

·       Cash can cost at least three times more than non-cash programs for the same results.

·       Cash programs easily get confused with compensation and can become an entitlement

Safety incentive companies have known for years that a small positive immediate award has more impact on changing safety behavior than a large, future and uncertain one.  By consistently and continuously reinforcing the right safety behavior with small amounts of awards you will change behavior and produce results.  This is far easier done with noncash awards than cash.

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