Safety Incentives Can be Hazardous to Your Health

After all the discussion by OSHA of not approving of traditional safety award programs, we still see many safety incentive programs  designed to reward only the end results, the outcomes, the decrease in incidents of injuries and accidents.  That trend persists and we have posted about the why management likes this type of program.   Mainly they are easier to measure and implement and management thinks they are not paying awards unless they get the results.

Actually the opposite is true.  When you reward only the results, you do nothing to change behavior and simply reward those who were lucky enough not to have an accident over the program period.  When you reward only the result, you incent people to do two things – not report safety violations and not report situations that could lead to safety violations. 

Safety incentives shouldn’t be centered on goal based incentives at all.  They should be based on recognizing employees for how you want them to behave on the job.  Recognizing safe work practices will lead to safe work performance, and ultimately a reduction in incidents. 

Instead of rewarding the result recognize and reward your employee for demonstrating the desired behavior.  When you do this, there will be two critical outcomes.

1. More frequent reporting of unsafe or potentially unsafe conditions before a safety incident occurs
2. More accurate reporting of safety violations since such reporting would itself be recognized.

Frankly this type of system does take a little more time to plan and implement, but the end result will be a safety culture that builds habits of safe behaviors.  And this type of system will cost much less in the long term. 

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