Mad About Incentives: Safety First

Incentive: Strategy

Mad About Incentives: Safety First
June 18, 2009

By Ley Borlo

Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub...

I loved that rhyme as a kid, and now it’s just as much fun to read it to the grandkids.

So you might ask what the heck that has to do with incentives? Well, there is a connection. For some reason, when I hear this rhyme, it always makes me think of being unsafe. The poem actually scared me as a kid. I can’t imagine taking to the high seas in a leaky old tub.

Since the beginning of my career, I've been fascinated by the behavioral-change aspects of a well-designed sales incentive program. Almost all of the ones I was involved in early on were programs designed to achieve increased sales and profits by motivating participants in the distribution channel to buy or sell more products. Over and over again, I saw firsthand how these programs produced incredible results for the clients. They also offered unmatched revenue and profit potential. Sales-related programs were and still are the mainstay of the incentive industry.

But I often wondered if you could take those same program design principles and apply them to non-sales programs and produce the same kind of results. It wasn’t until a few years into my career that I got my answer. We had a client, a large integrated logistics and transportation company, which wanted to ultimately eliminate all on-the-job injuries. To do this, the company needed to identify and correct hazardous employee behaviors in the workplace that could result in workers' compensation claims. The program utilized analysis, measurement, training, communications, feedback, and a new award component that the participants loved. The program achieved significant safety improvements in the first year and continued for several years thereafter. I guess you could say from then on I was hooked on safety. These programs worked as well or, in some cases, better than sales programs.

Unlike many client contacts I work with on sales and other employee-related award programs, safety professionals, by and large, are not well-versed or experienced in using award-based performance initiatives. Their job is loaded with a myriad of day-to-day activities, and most of them simply don’t have the time or experience to design and implement a successful award campaign. In my opinion, our industry has not done a good job of offering expertise to safety professionals as we do to sales or HR management. I suspect that it is because the gross volume and profits do not match that of opportunities in other fields. I have worked with many safety professionals over the years and have come to admire the hard work they put in every day to keep workers free from harm.

I am a strong advocate of safety incentive programs, simply because they work. Like their sales counterparts, safety professionals have an array of measurement and statistics to work with. Proper measurement and feedback is the foundation of any good incentive program and, combined with good communications, forms the nucleus of motivating employees to behavioral changes. Safety training in any accident-prevalent industry is a given, and most companies spend a great deal of time and money on it.

When you add the proper awards to this mix, you have the ingredients of a successful safety award system. When you include the expertise of an incentive company that has the knowledge to put all the ingredients together, your chances of a successful program increase greatly. Unfortunately many safety programs are implemented on a DIY basis by individuals who are not versed on these tactics and want to shortcut them. In addition, the award industry has many different types of award companies and deliverables, with some having less competence in implementing successful safety award programs than others. That combination can lead to programs with limited success or even programs that produce no significant result for the money spent. All of us on the sales side of this industry have heard clients tell us that safety incentives don’t work and, in fact, can produce negative results.

An award system should never be implemented until the client has done what it needs to build the best overall safety program. Safety awards do not take the place of any of the other components necessary to drive safe work performance. Award systems should be implemented to award behaviors produced by those components. And if you provide smaller awards that are applied on a continuous and consistent basis, you have a far better chance of changing behaviors than offering larger awards at the end of a specified period. Don’t award the destination, award the journey, and you will have more people who make that journey, so to speak.

Ley Borlo is a partner at Incentives Inc., www.incentivesinc.com, a full-service incentive company. In over 35 years in the industry, he has achieved success in sales, sales management, and corporate management with a leading incentive company. He founded Incentives Midwest LLC, a consultancy to educate companies on the vagaries of the award side of the business. He writes a bimonthly column for Incentive on the incentive industry from the perspective of someone who has purchased, sold, and managed those who have sold full-service incentive programs. Other topics he has written on the industry can be found on his blog, www.yourbabysugly.com

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