A Critique of Certain Common Safety Practices

Judy Agnew Ph.D. and Aubrey Daniels Ph.D., world renowned safety experts and authors of “Safe By Accident"Safe By Accident,” enumerated and critiqued several  common safety practices that you can find in many companies.  Here is list of one we felt were most salient. 

1. Don’t base safety incentives on incident rates. Having zero incidents is the ultimate goal of safety, but this flawed system unintentionally rewards luck, can encourage employees to not report incidents to avoid losing the incentive, and may result in reinforcing unsafe and unethical behavior. Instead, an incentive system should be based on motivating employees to engage in pinpointed safe behaviors.

2. Understand the value of near misses. There should be a prescribed way to produce a product in a safe, efficient manner. Any deviation from that should be classified as a near miss—sensitizing employees to observe deviations in their own behavior and that of other employees. Near misses provide valuable information about training, supervision and teamwork.

3. Don’t punish mistakes. Employees often fail to report safety concerns because they fear reprisal. Punishing unsafe behavior creates a culture of cover-ups. 

4. Understand that checklists are not foolproof. Checklists can become an important tool for developing sound behavior and producing long-lasting change, but sometimes people assume the very implementation is all that is required to change behavior, when it will only result in temporary change. Items should be observed apart from the checklist to ensure quality and safety. In addition, modify checklists by conducting post-mortems on projects and procedures to pinpoint tasks, roles, and responsibilities even more specifically.

5. Ditch inspirational safety signage. Without the clutter of signs that have no meaningful information, employees may be less likely to ignore important signage. In order to maximize effectiveness, use only compliance signs that direct specific behavior (“Hearing protection required in this area”) and informational signs when appropriate and relevant.

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

Everybody’s an Expert on Safety Award Systems

Last year we were involved in a diverse discussion on safety award systems on LinkedIn.  A member of the group asked for help and some ideas on safety awards.  The comments he received from the group, mainly safety managers, supervisors, safety specialists etc., many and varied.

What interested us, but did not surprise us, was the breadth of comments…some seemingly hostile, some with a respectful disbelief in safety incentives and some with complete confidence in safety awards as a viable means to reduce injuries and accidents. 

There are at least a couple of reasons why there is such a wide divergence of opinions of safety programs.

First many safety programs are implemented on a DIY basis by individuals who are not versed on the tactics used to produce and implement successful incentive programs.  Unfortunately when shortcutting those tactics they set themselves up to fail.  A vehement distrust of safety award systems can often be traced back to poorly designed and implemented programs, not the fault of safety awards as a whole.   Who’s the fault in a car accident, the car or the driver?

Second, the award industry has many different types of award companies and deliverables, with some having less competence in implementing successful safety award programs than others.  That combination can lead to programs with limited success or even programs that produce no significant result for the money spent. 

The combination of these two reasons often leads to disgruntled safety managers who are less inclined to implement a safety program ever again, and that’s a shame because they are a viable strategy to use within any overall safety effort, especially those that use minimal awards on a consistent and continuous basis to reward workers for positive safety behavior change.

Countless studies have shown that award programs properly planned and implemented, can be very effective at achieving dramatic results.  The International Society for Performance Improvement conducted the most comprehensive study ever on the effectiveness of the incentive industry and showed conclusively that these types of programs produce results.

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

Use Feedback to Bolster Positive Workplace Safety

One of the most important elements of a Behavior Based Safety Model is feedback, yet it is often the most overlooked. We know that behavior is a function of its consequences, and repeating the cycle of behavior change occurs when you make sure to let your workers know how well they are doing.

Behaviorists for decades have been informing companies about the importance of feedback.  Feedback is the glue that binds the “what” you want them to do with the “what’s in it for them”, the positive consequences for them making the change in the first place.  

The right safety 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. 

Here are a few tips on how to give proper feedback:

• Describe what you’ve personally seen, not what others told you
• Respect your workers privacy
• Concentrate on behaviors, not other unrelated issues
• Be as specific as possible
• Be as timely with the feedback as you can and give it as soon after the occurrence as possible

 Not having feedback is like bowling with a curtain in front of the pins.  You do a great job of lining up, approaching the lane with a good motion, rolling the ball down the center and hearing the pins dropping, but you don’t know how many went down.  You can’t have a good recognition program without letting everyone know how they are doing.

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

How Safety Awards are Taxed

We get this question a lot this time of the year.  Frankly different clients interpret the tax code differently when it comes to the taxation of safety awards  The reason is that the IRS rulings on the taxation of awards are not as clear as they should be, and because there are some incentive companies that twist these rulings to say that their award systems are not taxable. 


Of course like many other debates these days the real answer is somewhere in between all the misc. rhetoric that we hear. The trick is to sort out the rhetoric and “fake news” by some award vendors and find the truth for your own circumstances. 

The facts are that some safety awards are not taxable, and some are.  We have clients who do not include them as taxable income and we have clients that do.  Click here for a paper the legal lobbyist for the incentive industry to get an overview of the IRS rulings.  With this information you will be able to determine for yourself whether you want to implement a taxable program, or one that is non taxable.  Just remember not to pay too much attention to the rhetoric of some companies who would have you believe that their programs are not taxable and therefore less expensive.  Actually nothing could be further from the truth.  With the ridiculous pricing they use for their merchandise awards, your program may be costing you more and your employees receiving less in value for the same budget dollars.

We will be happy to show you the comparison of taxable and non taxable award systems.  That will give you more information to make an educated decision on what's right for you.

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

Behavior-Based Safety: Love it or Hate it?

In our post of 12-12-17 we discussed whether or not there was too much emphasis (or not) placed on Behavior Based Safety.  In it we showed a link to many pages of research and other studies on the subject.  There is certainly ample information in the safety industry to show that BBS can be effective in reducing incidents.  So why do we often hear from safety professionals that they really don’t want any part of BBS?

We think the easiest explanation for that is simply because BBS is too broad a term and is used to describe everything from basic employee behavior audits and feedback to a comprehensive safety management system designed to change a company’s safety culture, and frankly to anything in between.  It is lot like the term “safety incentive” which is a catchall for a myriad of award schemes, some good…some bad, that permeated the safety world for decades.  BBS and Safety Incentives are generic terms.  There’s no reason to hate them, but there are parts of them that will help you make your safety culture more successful.

Isn’t BBS in its truest form just a way to determine those behaviors that make your workplace unsafe?  And isn’t it a way to change them into positive safe behaviors to reduce incidents of injuries and accidents?  And isn’t that what safety professional are trying to do every day?

The name BBS itself implies that human behavior is in play here, and if you believe that, (not sure why you wouldn’t) there are tools that you can use to change that behavior.  In fact there are probably more papers and research conducted about behavior change than BBS.  The point is to uncover the behaviors you should be doing, and if you’re not doing them, then change them.  Of course the devil is in the details and it’s never as simple as this, but it’s also not a lot more complicated either.

There are clearly some very good things about BBS as stated by Donald Eckenfelder CSP, P.E. the principal consultant with Profit Protection Consultants and a past president of the ASSE: 

• Focuses on the human side of safety
• Defines safe and unsafe behaviors
• Encourages safe behavior and discourages unsafe or destructive behaviors
• Involves employees in safety
• Requires management to put its money where its mouth is
• Engenders commitment and passion about safety

Like any program though there can also be some negative things about BBS according to  Enkenfelder….

  

“Many BBS packaged programs don’t deal with the causes of safety failures; they deal with the symptoms. “Behaviors of employees are a long way from the root cause. If corporate management supports and encourages safe behavior by eliminating root causes – such as engineering, process, communication or training failures – then employees are more likely to want to adopt safe behaviors.”

However in our experience over the years, companies, managers and supervisors who actively and vocally support safe production and put money and resources behind that support are more likely to have a better BBS system, and more productive and engaged employees. 

With the overarching emphasis throughout the entire organization on employee engagement it would seem to make sense to have a BBS program of some type within your safety culture.  No one seems to disagree with the original basic concept of BBS – pointing out to employees how they contribute to a safe work environment by informing them when they are performing safe or unsafe acts – can be an essential part of a system that contributes to a healthy safety culture.

Of course knowing some basic principles and common sense approaches of how to interact with your workforce about behaviors, how to change that behavior and then how to recognize them for the positive behavior change is important.

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