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