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.

Don’t Measure Accidents

This title is a little inane to be in a discussion of safety. Of course you have to measure accidents; it’s one of the ways that tells you if your organization has been safe.  But is it the most important one?

What Gets Measured Gets Done…What Gets Rewarded Gets Repeated has been a mantra in the incentive awards industry for as long as I can remember. We all know that if you let people know you are measuring them, and reporting on that measurement to them and others, then you are likely to get the individual to at least work to achieve the objective.  And when you consistently apply positive reinforcement to positive performance, you can make that performance a habit.   Obviously it’s not as easy as that, but it’s certainly a good place to begin if you’re thinking of planning any kind of incentive program.  The key here is that you are rewarding a behavior, not a result.

Measuring performance is an important part of any managerial process and forms the basis for continuous improvement. Measuring safety performance is absolutely critical.  But measuring safety without providing feedback to your workers is like bowling through a curtain.  In our opinion if you want to improve safety performance and the overall effectiveness of your safety program, you need to change the way you measure it.  Observe the behaviors that effect safe performance

For years, organizations measured safety performance by analyzing injuries that had already occurred, such as frequency and severity, first aid injury rate, OSHA recordables, LTA’s….all “milestone” achievements.  Because of the tremendous expense, Worker’s Compensation costs were common points of analyzation.  So, following the incentive industry trend of rewarding results, safety incentives were given in the form “milestone” awards as well.

When OSHA began to express concern the some incentive programs had the potential to encourage workers to hide injuries, many of these “milestone” award programs were discontinued….many, but not all.  We continually see companies that have these types of programs.  And frankly, when we analyze these programs, the awards budgets exceed the budgets for behavior based programs that we implement today.

It’s difficult (if not impossible) to find an incentive company suggest rewarding for milestone achievement, yet many of these programs still exist.  Why?  A main reason is the reluctance of budget setting without a guarantee of a return on the expense.  However, this concern doesn’t seem to exist when budgeting for other pieces of the safety program such as training.  

Isn’t it time to consider the expense of rewarding positive safety behavior with continuous and consistent awards an economically sound way to prevent injuries and accidents?  We’ve changed the measurement, let’s change the attitude on positive reinforcement.

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

Make the “Near Miss” a “Good Catch”

“Near Misses” will always be a part of the safety world.  In fact, you want those long before you want an accident.  We know that reporting a good catch can have positive effects on your entire team.  Positive reinforcement of reporting near misses helps strengthen a positive safety culture. If anything, the reporting of a near miss should be celebrated and reinforced.  It’s through the entire conversation around the near miss that allows for better communications about safety.

When you reward the “Good Catch” you ensure that your whole team becomes aware of the importance or reporting incidents.  Whatever system you use make sure to make it as simple as possible.  Too many organizations make it so complicated that employees avoid such reporting entirely.

We should all want to know about the little things so they aren't big things in the future. Encouraging reporting of ‘good catches” will help you uncover those little things.

The wording, “Good Catch” while meaning the same thing, is much more positive, and encourages response.  Some clients also provide minimal types or rewards as positive reinforcement given publicly to acknowledge the reporter.

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

Taking Inventory of Your Safety Program

It’s always good to do an inventory of the basic components of your over safety program to keep and refine those things that are working well, to refine and improve those things that are marginal, and to delete those things things that don’t benefit your overall effort.

Judy Agnew and Aubrey Daniels, safety experts and authors of “Safe By Accident,” recently sent a list of points critiquing certain common safety practices. Here is what the authors had to say:

1. Don’t base safety incentives on incident rates. Having zero incidents is the ultimate goal of safety, but this flawed system unintentionally rewards luck, can encourage employees to not report incidents to avoid losing the incentive, and may result in reinforcing unsafe and unethical behavior. Instead, an incentive system should be based on motivating employees to engage in pinpointed safe behaviors.

2. Understand the value of near misses. There should be a prescribed way to produce a product in a safe, efficient manner. Any deviation from that should be classified as a near miss—sensitizing employees to observe deviations in their own behavior and that of other employees. Near misses provide valuable information about training, supervision and teamwork.

3. Don’t punish mistakes. Employees often fail to report safety concerns because they fear reprisal. Punishing unsafe behavior creates a culture of cover-ups. 

4. Understand that checklists are not foolproof. Checklists can become an important tool for developing sound behavior and producing long-lasting change, but sometimes people assume the very implementation is all that is required to change behavior, when it will only result in temporary change. Items should be observed apart from the checklist to ensure quality and safety. In addition, modify checklists by conducting post-mortems on projects and procedures to pinpoint tasks, roles, and responsibilities even more specifically.

5. Ditch inspirational safety signage. Without the clutter of signs that have no meaningful information, employees may be less likely to ignore important signage. In order to maximize effectiveness, use only compliance signs that direct specific behavior (“Hearing protection required in this area”) and informational signs when appropriate and relevant.

To this list we would add, Use Positive Consequences to Reinforce Positive Safety Behavior. 

To implement your overall safety initiative requires a sizeable budget.  It is natural for us to automatically include in that budget the proper amount of training, signage, PPE, necessary technology, etc to make the program work.  It is not automatic for many to include a budget for positive reinforcement of safe behaviors…the ultimate objective of your entire system.

Think about positive reinforcement as the piece of your budget that will drive all the other pieces.  It is usually a small amount in comparison to your other safety expenditures and will act as insurance that the other expenditures are effective.

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