Duration of Safety Award Programs and Frequency of Awards

How long should you run a safety award program? 

How frequently should you issue safety awards? 

What kind of safety award should you use?

Whenever a safety professional is considering using awards to stimulate safe work performance these questions invariably come up.  The reason is they are preconditioned to think of “buying” a safety incentive like they would “buy” a training solution.  If you ask anyone selling incentive awards they will come up with a variety of formulas and designs and timelines, some of which may even be based on earning awards for behavior improvement.  Incentive companies are preconditioned to sell you a solution that has finite time parameters.

Our answer to these questions is based on your current need.  As long as you are experiencing workplace behaviors that result in accidents, you should have an award mechanism in place that motivates the workers to change those behaviors.  Research has shown conclusively that:

A small, positive, immediate consequence has more impact on behavior than a large, future and uncertain one. And by consistently and continuously reinforcing behavior change with small amounts of awards, you will change behavior

The answers to these important questions can mean the difference between a safety award system that changes behavior to create lasting habits and one that doesn’t provide you anything other than good will when you hand out year end awards to those who were just lucky enough not to get into a accident.

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

Compare Open & Closed Loop Safety Reward Cards

Companies purchasing gift cards for safety incentives 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 open loop attributes:

n  Often impose a per card fee above the face value – can be as much as $5.95 per card;

n  Often expire and/or decline in value after 6 or 12 months if full balance is not used;

n  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;

n  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;

n  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).

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

Holiday Shopping and Safety Incentives

What does holiday shopping have to do with safety incentives?  It is the best time of the year to prove to any safety professional contemplating a safety incentive program that giving your employees a choice of any award they want it is a key to the success of your program. 

This holiday season sales are expected to be in excess of $655 billion.  Online Black Friday sales alone exceeded $3 billion!  So what did they buy and where did they buy it? You name it, anywhere and everywhere.  Certainly the national bricks and mortar retailers and their websites got the lion share of the sales, but many regional retailers had millions in sales as well.  In addition the online-only companies achieved huge sales as well, the foremost being Amazon.

Our point, when you plan an incentive program, it is virtually impossible to pick the handful of retailers or merchandise items that will appeal to your entire workforce, so why try.

Almost all incentive studies have shown that gift cards are the most popular and effective options within the safety incentive category. Over 80% of respondents to Incentive Magazine’s “Gift Card IQ” survey are currently using gift cards in their reward programs.

Some gift card suppliers would like YOU to choose which gift cards to offer in your incentive programs and will recommend what gift card brands would be most effective based on the unique composition of your employee base. That may be one way to do it, we however think you should give that option to your employees and let them choose the one they want.

As mentioned, it is virtually impossible to pick the handful of card brands that will appeal to all your employees.  Use a gift card system that will allow them to choose from a much larger list of brands that comprises over 95% of all retail sales.  Then you will have an incentive with far greater motivational appeal.

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

What’s the Best Safety Award to Use?

While this is not necessarily the most important question to consider when you want to implement a safety incentive program, it is a significant one. 

When selecting safety awards make sure that they appeal to the vast majority of your people.  Your program will have a much better chance for success when you do  Too often, safety planners don't take this into account.  Some safety professionals honestly feel that any award will do. While is true that any award is better than nothing, and you will get some motivation to work safely just by having a program that measures performance against a set of goals, the motivation will not be sustained unless what you are going to reward them with is something meaningful to the participants

In your planning phase:

• Do you use the awards that your award company wants to sell you?  
• Do you give your employees the award that you want them to have?
• Or do you ask your employees what award they want?  

As family involvement is extremely important to the success of any safety incentive campaign, do you choose awards that appeal to them? Remember that company identifiable clothing (tee shirts, hats etc.) have relatively little meaning for the family.  

Within reason, you should use the award that your employees really want, the one they would choose for themselves.

Click here if you would like to see a white paper on this subject.

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

The Benefit of True Choice in Safety Awards

Will the traditional merchandise and company logo wearables used to award safety sensitive employees in the past be effective in motivating and recognizing employees in today’s diverse workplace?

The Award of Choice card and On The Spot Safety Award card were developed by professionals in the safety industry to provide the broadest selection of merchants within a gift card program.  When you offer employees their choice of awards, they work harder to achieve your goals.  When the award is something that is personally meaningful to them and when...

 their families can participate in the award redemption process, YOUR program safety objectives become THEIR safety objectives.

Sometimes it’s just that simple; we don’t try to complicate it.

The Award of Choice program offers over 500 gift card brands!  See for yourself. 

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