When Should You Implement a Safety Incentive Award Program?

Before you determine when you should implement a safety award program, you should first decide if you really have a safety problem that can be addressed by changing the behavior of your workers.  That may sound obvious, but it isn’t always understood. 

Companies often confuse recognition awards for ongoing safety performance with safety incentives to motivate performance. They are both very valid tools to use in growing and maintaining a positive safety culture, but not necessarily interchangeable.  Motivating workers to perform (behave) in a safe manner requires all the pieces of the behavior change equation:  knowing what you want them to do, measuring how they do it, providing a positive consequence when it is completed, and then giving feedback.   If all you want to do is maintain your current positive safety performance, then providing safety recognition in the form of the awards can also be helpful. 

Many of the hundreds of “safety incentive programs” we’ve seen over the years are not safety incentives at all.  They are periodic recognition awards for overall safety performance.  Clients think recognition awards are motivating the safety performance, but they are not.  These programs don’t really effect behavior change.  Unless the behavior is changed and becomes a habit, it won’t produce a long term effect.  In these programs workers were lucky enough to have been given a recognition award for ‘being safe’. This is the simple reason why many safety professionals feel that safety incentives do not produce any long term benefits.  In actuality they weren’t designed to do so; they weren’t safety incentives at all. 

Safety recognition awards can be a valuable and strategic tool in your safety culture.  These are essentially safety communication devices that add to all of your safety programs to keep safety top of mind.  They become the ribbon that you wrap around your safety culture.  When they are used to keep safety at the forefront of your workplace, they can be effective. But they are designed to say thanks for the results, they don’t motivate workers to change behavior.

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