Safety incentives

nancyp · October 2002

I need some safety incentives for our employees. Does anyone have any ideas? Please let me know if you do. I feel we have tried about all there is to try and not producing any results. Help if you can.

HR Beginner · October 2002

For what kind of industry? You note that "nothing is working" so perhaps that is your answer. In another area of this forum, I have mentioned the controversial book by Alfie Kohn, "Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes". This will explain why incentives will probably never fix the problem, IMO.

Theresa Gegen TX · October 2002

I think focusing on training (rather than incentives) and constant reminders to get employees into a safety mindset work best. The best incentive for the employees is that they will not get injured. Supervisors have to embrace doing things safely (even if it takes more time), and should be evaluated based on the safety record of their teams.

The downside to incentives is that there are often used as evidence in workers' compensation retaliation lawsuits. The theory is that supervisors will lose money (or incentives) if workplace injuries occur and therefore, are angry at employees if they are injured on the job -- therefore they will retaliate (fire or harass) them. While I don't believe that it occurs very often, lawyers for employees love to argue that.

Good Luck!

nancyp · October 2002

Theresa,

We have been in the business just over 3 years and the workcomp expenses is just phenominal. The managers have been trying all kinds of incentives and programs and they feel nothing is working so they asked me if I could post the question on the forum to see what other companies were doing. After having said this, your response was what they needed to read. They are now looking at approaching this with a totally different view and actually feel they will get on the right path regarding this problem. Since this is not my area of expertise, I really appreciate your response and wisdom. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond.

Don D · October 2002

I've heard some really seasoned safety managers with some very large manufacturing firms, almost like a chorus, say, "We will never again (or no longer) pay our employees through incentives to do what they should be doing in the first place." Jackets don't work. Rings don't work. Bar B Ques don't change anything. Trips are fruitless. Promises of Taledega are not productive. Employee maindsets often become, "Oh yeah? What're you gonna gimme me extra to reduce accidents." Due to what we do, we have some relatively high comp experience and battle it daily, but, are channeling our energy toward discipline, training, re-training, soliciting legitimate input and ridding ourselves in the right way of those who won't come with us on this ride.

nancyp · October 2002

Guess who just received manager of our safety department on top of all other duties assigned??? ME
I am to start out fresh with new ideas, lower our workcomp injuries, set up safety committees etc. All I did was post a question and look what happened. This is too funny!!!
Seriously, thanks again for all your responses.

sonny · October 2002

To the above excellent responses, I would only add- consider the possibilty of really soliciting employee input and involvement. I do believe that when ee are part of the program/process, rather than just having it imposed upon them, you can get better results.

ritaanz · October 2002

As of today, we have been accident free for 645 days. We are a manufacturing facility employing over 100 people. The machine shop is the largest department in our company. The most important thing we did was invest time, attention and perseverance into training and job awareness. Teaching our people didn't take money or incentives. It took a commitment from the top and department managers to ensure that meetings (10-15 minutes) with their personnel were held daily. It worked for us.

sonny · October 2002

Great record. .CONGRATS

Bev · November 2002

I agree with most of the others. Consistent training and education is of the utmost importance in reducing work comp cases. As far as incentives it is very hard to reward employees for rules and regulations they should be following anyway. I too have had a hard time with incentive programs, they just do not seem to work well. However we have reduced our work injuries by about 75% over the past year by education and training, but most of all by involving the employees in the education process. They need to feel that they are part of making a difference in your programs, so we involve them in as many projects as possible. Let them do some of the training and education, we let them conduct safety committee meetings along with management of course. We raise money for our committee through fun projects that the employees decide upon. Make them feel like they belong too and not everything has to be done successfully by mangers. EMPLOYEES CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE, WE ARE PROOF.

mtrokey · December 2002

I firmly agree with all of you that the focus needs to be on training and constant reminders to get employeee's into the mindset. I also agree that supervisors need to embrace the idea of doing things safely even though it will take more time.

Unfortunately, we have a safety incentive program already in place that rewards employees for working safely. I really do not believe that it works very well, but we have over 1,000 employees (and growing quickly and in different areas of the state), and we just restructed our safety incentive plan which now reduces the "safety bonus" that the employees will receive for working safely. I think that the reduction of not getting the end of the year safety bonus, will not make employees very happy, but had to be done because of budget reasons, and because the previous safety incentive program was not working. I can also see employee's possibly acting negatively and the increase of accidents. This was a safety incentive program that was already in place, and I had nothing to do with except for following up with it since it was already in place.

Here is my question-

The industry that I work in is long-term care, and I was wondering if any of you are in the same industry or the medical industry, and do you use any safety incentive programs, or do you focus more on training. What kind of training do you do and how often? I want to focus more on the training aspect, but definitely need to get more by in from upper management, the training department, supervisors and managers, and employees.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,

safety · January 2003

We use a couple of incentive programs in our non-union manufacturing environment that work very well. The first is based on safe work days set at 75 days from our last OSHA incident. Every 75 days the reward is increased by $25 and paid to ee's in Chamber of Commerce gift certificates. The second incentive reward for safety is included in our winsharing program. The winsharing program is based on several plant goals, safety being one of them. If the plant works a qtr without an OSHA incident then the winsharing program pays each ee $25 in Chamber of Commerce gift certificates. Also we have a great behavioral safety process that audits ee safe behavior. I track the audit data and in a given qtr if the total observed safe behavior is at or above 90% then each ee is paid $65 in Chamber of Commerce gift certificates. The maximum amount of our winsharing payout per qtr per ee is $350 in Chamber of Commerce gift certificates. We have found that our ee's have become more aware of the need to work safe and our safety record shows this. While we suspect that these programs may cause some ee's to not report accidents, they have produced a lot of peer pressure on the floor to work safe as the workforce is very receptive to the gift certificate programs. I have heard many ee's talk about their spouses and their uses of the gift certificates so this also has placed pressure from home on the ee's to have safe work practices.

I do agree that a safety incentive program is rewarding an ee for something they should already do but I ask why not reward safe work practices. On the other side of this is accountability for safety. The last termination at the plant was for an unsafe act that led to our last OSHA event. Our ee's know that they will be held accountable for their actions through our discipline process.

tashaismydog · April 2003

I agree that there are problems with incentives, and they are not the "silver bullet" many organizations desire. However, when combined with training, audit programs, and other dimensions, they can be a good way to keep safe work methods on the minds of your employees.

We have a safety incentive plan, but it is only a small part of our total safety program. We pay it quarterly, and it works like this:

Employee does not experience a recordable injury = $30
No one in employee's immediate department has a recordable = +$10
Entire plant is free of recordable injuries = +$10

At the end of the year, we have a big holiday party. We take the names of all the people who did not have a recordable injury for the entire year, and draw six names. Each one of those people get $500.

Are we buying safety? No. Are we discouraging people from reporting injuries? No. It's not that rich. By the way, reporting an injury is a condition of employment, so getting your $10 per month is not worth losing your job.

jarhead217 · April 2003

Safety incentives can be effective IF they are coupled with plant-floor vigilance to ensure that injuries are reported. This falls to the supervisors and their awareness of what's happening in their departments. Once, you have assured injury reporting, we have found several incentives to be appreciated. We feel that individual incentives tend to divide and foster poor relations among individual employees. We use a monthly safety meal for all employees after 30 days of no lost time. These are simple meals brought to our facility. One month might be grinders, or a box lunch. Today, in fact, we are bringing in indicidual boxed pizza and salad. Some times we have a catered Bar-b-que in the brealroom. All of these meals fall withing a $6.00 -$6.50 price range. Another incentive we use is a $50 dollar government savings bond to each employee when we go 90 days (1 quarter) without a lost time injury. These bonds cost us $25 but the face value shows $50 . As you realize thisa incentive is not instant gratification but the employees hold on to these for years and use them for one-time only purchases. We recently reached 9 years without a lost time injury so many of our employees have 36 bonds , as well as enjoying a small lunch each month. It works for us. We just want ALL of emplyess to share in the success that they ALL participate in. We are just saying, "thanks for another month of safety"!

Safety Witch · April 2003

Many companies are looking at behavior based safety approaches. You don't need to go into the whole program, but one thing we found useful was rewarding ACTIVITIES for safety. If you have a higher hazard area, track the number of people attending safety committee meetings, contributing to safety suggestions, etc. If they are active in the safety progress, but there are still accidents, the group still can see progress being made. In other words, be pro-active instead of reactive. We stopped publishing (although we still keep the records) number of lost time accidents, number of days away, etc. Sometimes it discourages people from reporting and then you don't know the hazards and can't correct root causes. AT the end of the goal period the most active group can celebrate their efforts with doughnuts or lunch or something small of their choice. It is always better to reward group efforts than individual efforts.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Ethel · April 2003

We are a mfg. facility and went through the incentives phase and it didn't work for us either. What has worked and cut injuries tremendously is training. We had an outside (DuPont) group come in to assist and then went on from there. One source of safety training available to you if you have w/c insurance is your carrier. They have varied programs and classes and will pitch in and help. Additionally, each accident is investigated and reviewed by a "peer group committee" and that has really, really helped. Good luck!

safety · April 2003

Look at the plant safety culture from TOP to bottom. No incentive will change the culture if managers and supervisors do not buy-in to the safety process. Start there and work your way to the rest of the workforce to determine what the safety culture is.

You may want to try a safety perception survey for this and when the results are in you then can focus on culture change.

Cotterwood · April 2003

Not that you haven't received enough suggestions already, but here's what we do and it seems to work very well.

'Safe Worker Award:

As part of the District's safety incentive program, all eligible employees who remain accident free for six months, having no at-fault, lost-time, on-the-job injuries, or reportable vehicle accidents, will receive four hours of general leave. An additional award of value (cash award) to be determined by the District shall be given for one year of accident free performanc. Seasonal employees who complete the season accident free will receive four hours of general leave."

Envoy · September 2003

Here's my $10 worth:

My company handles WC for a range of industries in NYS for 80 years. I am the safety advisor to these various groups and individual ER's. I notice that without empirical data, ER's often attribute their failures and successes to actions or elements that really are not the root cause of the success or failure of their safety records. Here are some insights/POV contrasted with empirical research on safety performance:

1) Research Shows - Training does not improve safety performance i.e. we all know we should lose weight and not speed. It can be drilled into us, but we won't do it. HOWEVER, people do need to know this information in the first place and be conversant in it, and that's what makes training important. Whether they act on it or not, has more to do with HOW the message is conveyed throughout the year and in the how the organization operates, i.e. with TOP MANAGEMENT COMMITMENT implementing a companywide meaningful SAFETY CULTURE.

2) Research Shows - You should reward what you WANT actively. Never set a non-goal, or reward a non-action, i.e. "zero accidents". By sheer probability, most people will have no events. Why reward for doing nothing, just breathing? If you win the safety bingo, can you say what you actually DID? Meanwhile, focusing on "zero accidents" you may have missed the opportunity to underscore your real VISION or GOAL of SAFETY PERFORMANCE which includes COOPERATION, INNOVATION, COMMUNICATION, GOOD CITIZENSHIP behaviors and such, that should be articulated and actively rewarded. Much of the $$ incentives get what ER's reward, which is 'no reported accidents', that may not necessarily translate into safe performance.

3) Research Shows - You get what you expect. EE's perform as expected by whomever holds them immediately accountable. We actually all behave this way. Supervisors often send mixed messages, preaching one thing, but allowing another on a routine basis, or, reluctantly tolerate sub-standard conduct, all behind the backdrop of a corporate safety campaign.

In the end, we don't need money or games. We need recognition, accountability, information and a culture that values safety performance.

tashaismydog · October 2003

Opinions on this stuff vary widely, but I have used something in two different industries that seems to work pretty well. It's not so rich that it discourages reporting, but it's enough that it gets the attention of the people. Here's the basic structure ($ amounts are actually in gift certificates, and if it's part of a written program you can award up to $1600 without tax issues). We also have grand prizes and some quarterly promotions.

I agree that it's not a silver bullet, but it creates enough awareness at regular intervals that safety stays on the minds of our employees. Every single one can tell you how the program works, who got hurt, how it affects them, etc. That's worth something, I believe.

*************************************************
We are pleased to announce the Safety Incentive Program. Beginning October 1, 2003 you will be rewarded each quarter for your safe work performance. You can get an even bigger reward if your department avoids injuries and even more if your entire location works safely.

To be eligible for the Safety Incentive, you cannot have a “recordable” work-related injury (according to OSHA guidelines). Safety Incentives are valued as follows:

You have no work-related injury during the quarter +$30
You have no lost-time injuries during the quarter +$10
Your department has no work-related injuries during the quarter +$10
The entire location has no work-related injuries during the quarter +$10

TOTAL QUARTERLY INCENTIVE AVAILABLE =$60

Safety Incentives are awarded in the form of gift certificates to your favorite stores. They are calculated every three months. If you have questions about the program, see your supervisor or contact the Human Resources department.

********************************************

maryfmurray · October 2003

All said and done with safety incentives, I work for a small non-profit in New Hampshire and have been assigned the task of creating safety awards for this coming years retreat. The catch here is I will have no budget to spend, therefore purchasing any awards is out of the question or promising money in the future is a no! No!. Currently we are having problems with our time off policy so giving more time off is not a solution either. I would like to show some form of appreciation to employees who do not get paid much as it is for a job well done.
I turn to the forum of great minds to help brainstorm for suggestive ideas on how to give awards or incentives without monetary gain. Good one! I sure have not been able to come up with much other than printing out fliers that say thank you. If I didn't think incentives would cost too much, I'd pay for them myself.

Any suggestions! Please help! We all do thank you!

Safety incentives

Comments