SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
Play It Safe: Incentivize for Safety
December 10, 2007
Strong incentives for workplace safety
By Ben Chapman
The Utah mine tragedy this past August was a dramatic reminder of the importance of workplace safety. A Senate investigation, a month-long search in which three rescuers were killed and the obligatory media coverage have businesses even more concerned with workplace safety—this in an environment that's already hurting from workers' compensation costs and lost productivity.
Caved-in mines and compensation claims make lurid headlines, but most workplaces are safer now than ever. Thanks to more managers using incentive-based programs, more businesses are safe and healthy places to work.
But there's still room for improvement. While most managers aren't operating in industries that could see employees suffocating in a collapsed cavern below tons of earth, every occupation has safety issues.
Safety Strengths and Weak Spots
According to the experts, working in America is safer than ever before. The Department of Labor's National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries for 2006 shows that 5,703 people died from on-the-job injuries in 2006, compared with 5,734 in 2005. These are numbers for employers to be proud of, because the overall fatal work injury rate in 2006 was the lowest ever measured.
When the report was issued in August, Edwin G. Foulke Jr., the assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), issued a statement saying, "We are pleased to see both the rate and number of fatal work injuries continue to decline."
But, Foulke added, "While these figures demonstrate progress, we still have a long way to go."
Indeed, though the numbers are promising, safety experts agree there's still plenty of room for improvement. Bill Sims Jr. has over 25 years' experience with employee motivation programs, and a client list of major companies like Lockheed Martin, Georgia-Pacific and Heartland Foods. Yet he says that promoting workplace safety remains a priority for too few companies, and most workplace injuries result from human error and can be avoided.
"The market [for safety incentives] may be growing by leaps and bounds, but it remains a niche," says the president of The Bill Sims Company Inc. in Columbia, S.C. "The industries that are most interested in safety incentives are still those with the greatest risk for accidents," he continues. "You won't find many insurance companies that are serious about safety." Instead, it's the businesses that operate in dangerous environments, or use risky materials, that are most concerned with safety.
Another problem is that many existing programs are ineffective because of poor design or administration. The task of rewarding employees for safe behaviors is more complicated than giving gifts to workers who don't use their sick days, Sims says. Yet, "too often managers are obsessed with finding the perfect gift. They're not paying enough attention to the worker behaviors they're manipulating."
A third of safety incentive programs may suffer from hidden injuries, Sims estimates. "It can become a situation where incentive programs are causing people to suppress injuries to get the rewards," he says. "A lot of companies appear to be really safe, but it gets swept under the rug."
 Focused on Safety
While there's room for improvement, many workplaces are safer, and it's largely due to the efforts of individual managers to create cultures of safety on the job. "I think that the people who are responsible for safety in workplace environments are beginning to realize the power of creating an incentive program," says Denny Gorman, president of Wrightsville, Pa.–based Gorman Consulting. "A lot of managers have been using incentives to motivate employees for a long time, but now they're realizing that an incentive program can be really effective for promoting safer behavior in the workplace."
Managers are motivated to create safer workplaces because mishaps can have disastrous impacts, not only on the injured parties, but on workplace morale, worker productivity and the bottom line. "The pressure is on companies to reduce worker compensation and insurance costs," says Gorman. "And though the need for workplace safety extends across all demographics, worker compensation costs are higher in jobs that are inherently less safe. Employers will pay higher insurance premiums for a drill press operator working on a shop floor, as opposed to someone doing clerical work in an office."
However, safety lessons learned in one setting can be applied to others. Consider the following case study from a manufacturing plant: "The principle of rewarding safer behavior can be applied to all kinds of workplaces. Several years ago I worked with a very small manufacturing company with a very small budget for its safety incentive program," recalls Gorman. "The company owner was working with a relatively old workforce, and it was an industrial environment where people were operating relatively dangerous machinery. The owner's problem was that he had been fined by OSHA because his people weren't wearing their safety equipment."
Though employees had been provided with safety gear like gloves, goggles and earplugs, and had been instructed to use them, compliance was low. To improve compliance Gorman and the company owner created a spot incentive program called "Focus on Safety." First, the company's 60 employees were exposed to posters and collateral material bearing the slogan. "And then," says Gorman, "the crux of the program was that the company owner bought binoculars, magnifying glasses, cameras with manual-focus zoom lenses; anything that we could find that had a focus tie-in."
The company owner chose four different dates, "and on each of those random dates he simply walked though the factory and made notes of who was wearing the proper safety gear. And on the first date he had only three employees that were completely in compliance with the safety protocol," Gorman recalls. "Without saying a word he handed those three employees cameras, and ignored everyone else. A few weeks later he did the same thing. He walked through the factory again, and he found that about ten employees were wearing their safety equipment. He gave each of them a pair of binoculars."
The boss repeated these factory walk-throughs with spot incentive rewards four times over a six-week period, and by the end of the program, he'd achieved a 90 percent compliance rate to his safety mandate. The program was a success for the company owner. "It allowed him to give instant feedback to employees that were doing things right, and he simply ignored the ones that were doing it wrong," says Gorman. "It was a very simple program." Simple, but effective. "Sometimes we in the promotional products industry overcomplicate what we do. In this case a simple approach to a simple compliance problem yielded results," Gorman states. "That's what promotional products do best: Change behavior."
Lessons from the Mines
Six missing mine workers in Utah, and the grueling, deadly month-long search by federal mining authorities that followed, brought attention to the dangers of mining operations. But safety lessons learned in workplaces like mines can be applied to all sorts of occupational environments. "A high-profile accident raises awareness," says Steve Timmerman, vice president of business development for Los Angeles–based Perks.com, "but workplace safety is a business imperative in every industry."
Timmerman is quite familiar with dangerous occupational settings. Before his work with the incentive house Perks.com, he worked in the mines himself, as an Environmental Chemist employed by Texasgulf Chemicals at its Phosphate Mining Operations in Aurora, N.C. From 1980 to 1983, he worked to promote safety at the mine, supervising a team that monitored environmental quality compliance for air and water as well as waste management.
"The work environment certainly had the potential for being quite dangerous," he recalls. "My team and I climbed 200-foot vent stacks to collect air samples and navigated around mining equipment the size of office buildings." Now, with Perks.com, Timmerman consults with client companies in a variety of industries on safety incentive programs. "We work with companies involved in chemical production and petrochemical production as well as manufacturing and service companies," he says. The common denominator is that all the companies are using incentives to motivate positive employee behavior.
Across different industries, and from small companies to massive corporations, incentive programs that reward safer behavior are effective tools for creating healthier workplaces, Timmerman explains. "I don't think there's any silver bullet that does it all," but recognition, incentives and rewards can be used to promote safety in a variety of industries, he says. "Whether it's a large organization or a small one, the fundamentals are identical."
Taking a proactive, preventative approach to hazards on the job is an effective strategy in almost any setting. And rewarding safe workplace performance with positive reinforcement can yield good results no matter how big or small the company. When it comes to creating an effective safety incentive program, "You don't need to reinvent the wheel," says Timmerman. "Figure out what works well, and capitalize on it."
Sidebar: Safety Jackpot Program Offers Well-Designed Effort
With more than 50 years of incentive experience, Peavey Performance Systems, in Lenexa, Kan., has identified some of the essential qualities of a successful safety incentive program and built them into its Safety Jackpot incentive program—and that's why it's successful for so many companies today.
1. Set your safety program's criteria to meet your company's needs. Safety Jackpot can be individually tailored to help you achieve your goals. It can help you increase safety awareness, improve participation in safety events, decrease accidents, improve attendance or affect other behavior that needs attention.
2. Keep things simple. The simpler the safety program, the easier it is to administer. A good safety incentive program is one that doesn't take productive time away from any of your employees. Complexity is not a requirement; in fact, it should be avoided.
3. Promotion is key. One of the easiest ways to keep goals in front of everyone is with lots of visible reminders. Plan a kickoff party to promote your company's exciting, new safety program. And continue to promote the program year-round with posters and newsletters—the Safety Jackpot program has lots of ways to keep people motivated.
4. Frequently reward your employees. To keep people motivated and achieving your goals, reward behavior constantly. Weekly distribution of game cards has proven to be effective. Use bonus cards to reward monthly, quarterly, annually or on-the-spot when your employees go "above-and-beyond" on the job.
5. Reward both individual and team performance. Establish a healthy level of pride with a balance of individual recognition and team recognition. Recognize team results so everyone has a stake in the performance of those around them to promote self-supervision and to help direct supervisors police the program.
6. Allow all who achieve to win. Universal recognition is the only way to achieve long-term results. Avoid the "all or none" mentality of penalizing everyone when one person fails to achieve the goal. Everyone who achieves must be recognized for their individual good efforts.
7. Reward proactive behavior. Build in a good balance between proactive behavior and accident prevention. If all of the emphasis is on the desired results, the behavior necessary to achieve the results may not be there. Examples of proactive behavior include reporting a near miss, attending a safety meeting, passing a safety quiz or having a safety suggestion implemented.
8. Encourage interaction. Encourage your employees to interact, trade cards and talk about the program. The more interaction among employees, the more excitement there is about your incentive program, which has a direct effect on the success of your safety program and the return on your investment.
9. Be creative. Be prepared to change your program's criteria whenever needed. Spice things up with on-the-spot rewards, award bonus cards for perfect attendance, offer monthly prizes or include game cards with quarterly or annual employee performance awards. Every effort that goes into building interest in the Safety Jackpot program has a direct effect on safety awareness and bottom-line safety costs.
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Marketing Index |
|
|
