Modernize Your Safety Incentive Program
New advancements in gamification, automation, and behavior rewarding deliver stronger accident reduction.
- By Buck Peavey
- Apr 01, 2022
Before we discuss how to modernize, we must understand how safety incentives have evolved and what we have learned. Programs of the past had issues, and it all started with simple dangle the carrot type programs. Don’t have an accident and win a company jacket with a badge, or maybe even some cash. Employees craved cash and these programs grabbed employee attention back in the day. They did incite safer on-the-job behavior, but there were some downsides. Office time to administer those programs was high, and the excitement level and effectiveness of the program waned after about six months.
The cash programs quickly morphed from being seen as safety recognition to extra compensation that employees soon felt they were entitled to. Once everyone got their jacket or pizza reward at the safety celebration, they quickly lost interest and returned to unsafe habits.
In response, the industry decided to get more creative. Gift certificates followed by the gift cards of today were dangled as the carrot instead of cash. We all thought the popular cards would create long-term safe behavior change. Not the case. Eventually, the entitlement issue mimicked the cash incentive issues and, in today’s world, gift cards are now considered taxable to the employee (like cash).
Employers in the 1980s turned to Safety Bingo. This gamification element certainly created more promotion and hype, plus it held employee interest longer. However, when employees eventually learned that there were only a few that won, the results quickly faded. The time that it took to administer and promote such programs also became a challenge for employers. As a company that has 70 years of administering and seeing the outcome of safety incentive programs, I can assure you, we have certainly learned that when administration becomes time-consuming for management, the promotion and results of a safety incentive program plummet.
The Issue with Lagging Indictors
When employers rewarded employees solely upon lagging indicators, like not having an accident, this stirred up controversy. The fear was these programs caused underreporting and hiding of smaller accidents. This, of course, was followed by many companies avoiding incentive programs altogether. High accident rates and increased fatalities returned to most of those companies that discontinued their incentive programs.
This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.