Employee Engagement Drives 70% Fewer Safety Incidents

The Gallup’s most recent State of the American Workplace report paints a fairly clear picture or how important employee engagement is to company success. 

When compared to organizations with lower levels of employee engagement, those with higher levels of engagement typically experience these type results:

• 41% lower absenteeism
• 24% lower turnover (high turnover industries)
• 59% lower turnover (low turnover industries)
• 28% less shrinkage
• 70% fewer employee safety incidents
• 58% fewer patient safety incidents
• 40% fewer quality incidents (defects)
• 17% higher productivity
• 20% higher sales
• 21% higher profitability

As the majority of employee engagement is based on employee satisfaction, and employee appreciation and recognition is a key component of satisfied employees, it is also fair to say that employee recognition and awards are key in increasing performance.

For years, the C-Suite constantly asked for the return on investment of recognition and reward dollars.  Is it not also fair to say that employee rewards systems can drive bottom line results and the increase in profits noted by the stats above?

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

Enterprise Safety Engagement

Nearly 5,000 workers die each year in the U.S., of over 3 per 100,000.  This has remained relative consistent over the years regardless of how many changes there have been in OSHA regulations,  There are close to 4 million work-related injuries and illnesses reported.  However, many believe that under-reporting is widespread.
 

Experts agree that while worker deaths and accidents can never be eliminated, there remain opportunities for improvement by addressing the long-overlooked human factor. Many feel that OSHA regulations could do a better job of addressing all the ways organizations can engage employees and other stakeholders in safety and well-being by connecting the dots between all stakeholders and engagement factors involved.
 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has stated that:

“Employers that invest in workplace safety and health can expect to reduce fatalities, injuries, and illnesses. This will result in cost savings in a variety of areas, such as lowering workers' compensation costs and medical expenses, avoiding OSHA penalties, and reducing costs to train replacement employees and conduct accident investigations. In addition, employers often find that changes made to improve workplace safety and health can result in significant improvements to their organization's productivity and financial performance.”

Despite the compelling economics, management often overlooks the return on investment of minimizing accidents, not only in concrete costs but in overall stakeholder engagement. By addressing safety as part of an enterprise approach to engagement, safety can be baked into the culture and all the ways organizations actualize it with all stakeholders to achieve sustainable results.
 

A new chapter in Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap 5th edition “utilizes ISO Quality Management standards to map out how organizations can make enterprise safety engagement a part of their culture, engagement processes, and human capital scorecard.”

The map as explained to the safety audience contains much the same categories as the Employee Engagement model of only a few short years ago.  They include:

• ·       Creating a culture of safety values with clear objectives
• ·       Prepare and coach leadership and assess current levels 
• ·       Communications
• ·       Job Design
• ·       Training
• ·       Innovation
• ·       Community
• ·       Rewards and Recognition
• ·       Measurement and Analytics

Unlike traditional approaches to safety programs, ISO 10018 seeks integration and alignment of all stakeholders: customers, distribution partners, employees and communities.

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

Employee Engagement Can Produce Fewer Safety Incidents

Over the last few years there has been a lot written on Employee Engagement.  It has become the large cauldron that contains everything you ever wanted to know about how to engage your employees, make them perform better, have better attitudes etc.  Gallup’s most recent State of the American Workplace report paints a fairly clear picture that employee engagement is working.  By looking at the results of this study, it is apparent that it works.  What it doesn’t really show is what exactly is employee engagement in the first place and how exactly is it measured.  There seems to be differences of opinion on that.

Regardless, Gallup states that compared to organizations with lower levels of employee engagement, those with higher levels of engagement typically experience:

• 41% lower absenteeism
• 24% lower turnover (high turnover industries)
• 59% lower turnover (low turnover industries)
• 28% less shrinkage
• 70% fewer employee safety incidents
• 58% fewer patient safety incidents
• 40% fewer quality incidents (defects)
• 17% higher productivity
• 20% higher sales
• 21% higher profitability

If the above numbers are correct, and you really do know how to improve employee engagement, it should form a base for any safety culture. 

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

Best Practices for Building Effective Relationships around Safety

According the Judy Agnew, Ph.D. a senior vice president of ADI, to ensure the best possible results for your safety initiatives, you need to have effective relationships between management and employees.  For that to occur, there are several important things that management can do.  Following are some of these:

• Make expectations extremely clear, don’t leave room for assumptions

• Learn to be an active listener, using the skills necessary to do so.

• Take the time to acknowledge positive safety performance, not just mistakes or errors

• Engage employees with questions to understand problems and issues don’t just jump to conclusions.  Good questions uncover details, there are two sides to every story

• Ask your direct reports to give you feedback on your own effectiveness and areas that you can improve on. Admit when you make mistakes, and learning from them.

• Avoid blame wherever possible. What people do makes sense to them even if it doesn’t make sense to you.  Try to find out what lead to the undesired behavior

• Respond fairly to incidents, safety and other wise.

• You build respect with your direct reports when you solicit their opinions and input

• Follow through…do what you say you will do

• Stand up for your direct reports, verbally promote them and share their success with others, and if they make mistakes acknowledge some responsibility

• Your main objective is to help your employees become successful.  Find out what gets in their way and remove it if possible

• Use direct pinpointed feedback and do it just in time. 

• Trust your employees, give them responsibilities and avoid micromanaging them.

• Treat your employees like people, showing interest in their lives with concern and consideration Make expectations extremely clear, don’t leave room for assumptions

• Learn to be an active listener, using the skills necessary to do so.

• Take the time to acknowledge positive safety performance, not just mistakes or errors

• Engage employees with questions to understand problems and issues don’t just jump to conclusions.  Good questions uncover details, there are two sides to every story

• Ask your direct reports to give you feedback on your own effectiveness and areas that you can improve on. Admit when you make mistakes, and learning from them.

• Avoid blame wherever possible. What people do makes sense to them even if it doesn’t make sense to you.  Try to find out what lead to the undesired behavior

• Respond fairly to incidents, safety and other wise.

• You build respect with your direct reports when you solicit their opinions and input

• Follow through…do what you say you will do

• Stand up for your direct reports, verbally promote them and share their success with others, and if they make mistakes acknowledge some responsibility

• Your main objective is to help your employees become successful.  Find out what gets in their way and remove it if possible

• Use direct pinpointed feedback and do it just in time. That it the most effective

• Trust your employees, give them responsibilities and avoid micromanaging them.

• Treat your employees like people, showing interest in their lives with concern and consideration

These skills based on negotiation, flexibility and good will rather than coercion are well worth developing if you want to create relationships that result in a trusting and thus high-performance safety culture.

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

Why Relationships Matter in Safety

Following is a synopsis of an interesting blog post written by Judy Agnew Ph.D., senior vice president of Aubrey Daniels International, who works closely with clients to strengthen sustainable safety cultures.  She maintains that a solid safety culture starts with good relationships between employees and management. 

From a behaviorist’s perspective, safety is fundamentally a behavioral issue.  And as such, the only way to change or improve behavior is to use a process grounded in the science of behavior.   That process has to start with a positive and trusting working relationship between employee and management.  To go beyond the basics compliance requirements of a safety process, it boils down to the discretionary effort of the employees.  Exceptional safety happens when employees are in lock step with management.  Unfortunately you won’t get this kind of discretionary effort when employees dislike, distrust or worse, fear the boss.

According to Agnew:

Discretionary effort is created through the use of positive reinforcement. Research shows that when people are recognized for what they do well around safety and when reporting problems and concerns is met with reinforcing consequences (such as joint problem solving and problem resolution), employees will be more engaged in safety.

Within the post you can see a list of behaviors that contribute to positive workplace relationship.  They can be exhibited by any worker type and will lead to improved work in general.

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

Employee Engagement Crucial to Safety Program Success

As noted in several of our posts, employee engagement is just as important in the safety world as it is on overall corporate culture.  Just as a hypothesis, people who don't like their job probably don't do a very good job. 

According to Evolve Performance Group, an employee engagement consultant, employees who are engaged on the job and respect their leaders are 48% safer than those who don't.

Before AwardSafety.com was in the business of providing the right kind of behavior based safety awards to increase safe behaviors, we were (and are) also in the business of providing employee recognition awards for a myriad of corporate award solutions.  That field is strongly driven by the current corporate need of encouraging employee engagement.  And some act as if it was the Holy Grail.  The problem is what these consultants don’t tell you….that employee engagement can be a controversial topic mainly because it is hard to define and even harder to tie to business metrics and a quantifiable return on investment.

Regardless, we know that an engaged employees will produce better results. And Safety leaders need personal influence skills to consistently engage their workers. 

Safety training must be more than just informative and comprehensive. It must also ensure that employees feel valuable and understand how they contribute to the organization's overall success. When was the last time you were eager to learn that you're not very good at something...and possibly irrelevant?   

Without knowing your employees current opinions and how to create a sustainable inclusive safety culture you can invalidate the workforce and prevent buy-in. That will unfortunately lead to reduced awareness on the job site. After all, if your employees I consider the safety program to be unclear and condescending, they will not pay attention.  In that sense, employee engagement is extremely important to your overall safety outcomes.  

The core of safety lives within your people, not in your plans, programs, or ideas. Employee engagement should be the foundation on which your safety initiatives should be built. 

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

Employee Engagement is a Safety Problem Too!

Today, almost all business performance issues are tied to employee engagement.  Recently the EHS Advisor surveyed over 600 safety professionals across North America and 90% found that the greatest barrier to safe work performance is lack of worker participation.  These professional are not alone.  According to Gallup’s State of American Manager 70% of the entire United States Workforce is disengaged with their job.

The employee engagement model is a vast construct that touches almost all parts of human resource management. It is built on the foundation of earlier strategies like job satisfaction and employee commitment and the research and training plans that affect those strategies. However it is broader in scope. Because of engagement is such a strong predictor of company performance it clearly show the two –way relationship between employer and employee.

Though it is related to and encompasses these concepts, employee engagement is broader in scope. Employee engagement is a stronger predictor of positive organizational performance clearly showing the two-way relationship between employer and employee compared to the three earlier constructs: job satisfaction, employee commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. According to many HR consultants engaged employees…

“are emotionally attached to their organization and highly involved in their job with a great enthusiasm for the success of their employer, going extra mile beyond the employment contractual agreement.”

Employee recognition in all its forms has become the backbone of improving employee engagement.  Direct improvement in performance has been achieved by using this strategy.  And awards for improved safety performance (some would call them safety incentives) are an ideal way of adding recognition to your overall safety effort.  The same tools that apply within the Human resource world to combat employee disengagement are more than present in safety cultures, namely communications, training, measurement, feedback and awards.

A well planned safety recognition effort will reward improved performances, turn them into habits and help to engage your workforce.  Budgets for non-safety employee recognition has been growing consistently for years because it works to improve engagement…it can be that simple!

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

The Power of Positive Thinking & Safety Culture

While Norman Vincent Peale (1998-1994) was a prolific writer, “The Power of Positive Thinking” was by far his most widely read work.  The book was first published in 1952. Now, over 60 years later, advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have added some scientific evidence to his theory. 

For years the phrase “positive thinking” was considered by many to be a soft and fluffy term that was easy to dismiss.  The workplace guru’s preferred the more intellectual terms of “work ethic” and “persistence,” or more recent, “employee engagement.”  We won’t attempt to explain the vast amount of research that has gone into this study, but do want to give you some of the conclusions drawn that are very interesting when it comes to understanding employee attitudes that have so much to do with employee performance.

These recent advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have shown, as the scientists say, “how our life’s ups and downs activate different neural circuits in the brain and create rapid changes in a range of important neurotransmitters.”  In other words changes in brain chemistry can alter how we think which then relates to how we feel and then how we behave.

Keeping a positive attitude and reducing work stress whenever possible can be critical in a safety environment.  Consider the following conclusions that were derived from a large meta-analysis combining the findings of over 225 academic studies on employees with a positive psychological wellbeing:

• They have on average 31% higher productivity  
• Are highly predictive to have long-term physical health
• Are less likely to have elevated levels of stress and stress related illness
• Avoid the anxiety that triggers depression

Negative emotions that are caused by fear, anger, stress, self-doubt etc closes our brain off from the outside world where positive emotions broaden the sense of possibility and opens our mind to more positive options. 

A recent Gallup survey reported that 70% of the US workforce is disengaged with their job. EHS Advisor in a recent survey relayed that over 90% of safety professionals felt that the lack of worker participation was the number one issue they faced on the job. 

While maintaining and fostering a positive attitude toward safe work performance may not be the answer to a great safety culture, it certainly will play an important part.

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

Millennials Love Gift Cards

If you want to motivate or recognize the safety performance of millennials, give them a choice of gift cards. 

Recent research conducted by NPD Group and the Wharton School finds that gift cards are particularly popular with the younger generation.  It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that this group is “wired”, they grew up online, are connected always through various devices, and when they shop they prefer to use gift cards, and specifically electronic gift cards.

While various groups can agree or disagree on traditional vs electronic gift cards, in general, many of the younger age groups, and even many Boomers, prefer general purpose bank cards vs specific store cards because they can be used almost anywhere.  Unfortunately, from the perspective of a buyer of employee recognition programs, these bank cards can charge purchase fees from $3.95 to $6.95 per card.  And, as the vast majority of gift cards used in safety incentive programs are valued at $25, these fees can amount to an additional 15% to 30% added to your budget.

When faced with this choice, buyers often consider using one of several gift card solutions that are available in the incentive industry.  These solutions allow them to award one card or certificate that can then be redeemed for large array of popular gift cards.  Many of these solutions also contain a fee per card, or other fees raising your budget.

There is one safety award system that does not charge any outward or hidden fees...the On The Spot safety award.

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