Award Prevention not Results

If you ask any safety professional, they will all tell you that preventing accidents is far less costly than fixing them.  Just as productivity experts have been saying for years, that improving productivity depends on predicting and preventing process failures rather than spending the bulk of your resources after failures have occurred.  So to, companies need to predict and eliminate hazards that can result in injuries.

Behavior Based Safety is in place at many companies because it works. It forms the nucleus of many continuous improvement safety programs.  While there are many anti-BB people out there, it is usually because they have experienced BBS programs that were not rooted properly in the behavior sciences and not implemented correctly.  This same misconception exists about safety incentives.  Those disparage them do so because their experience is based on programs that were poorly implemented.

Safety incentive systems should focus on rewarding the prediction and prevention of incidents.  By reinforcing prevention in a positive manner on an ongoing basis, you can change behavior and decrease accidents.  Prevention is far less costly than correction. 

All injuries may or may not be preventable.  And bad safety habits can be changed by using the proven tenets of behavior based safety and then rewarding the change with positive reinforcement. 

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