You’ve seen them, used them, or maybe even rejected them. For decades businesses have encouraged safe behavior with incentives. But are they a benefit or a liability?
Ball caps, jackets, logoed merchandise, pizza, points, gift cards, and discounts… the list goes on. Whatever the reward, the idea is generally this—employers give workers something in exchange for desired behavior or action.
The use of incentives isn’t limited to safety, of course. They’re also used to improve productivity, participation, loyalty, attendance, and health status. But when it comes to safety, the practice is particularly controversial because, critics say, employees may hide injuries in order to get the reward.
Janet Agnew, a senior vice president for Safety Solutions at Aubrey Daniels International, for example, sees no role for incentives as they have typically been used.
"The problem with any kind of incentive that has a monetary value (beyond maybe a pizza) is that it can motivate some people to do things, including lying and cheating, that they wouldn’t otherwise do to get the incentive," says Agnew.
Hiding near-misses is a particular problem. "If people are afraid to report, we lose some of the best learning opportunities we have."
Agnew is also concerned that workers can behave unsafely, and if they don’t get caught, still earn a reward. As long as there is no accident they deserve the incentive, the thinking goes. "But that’s almost as bad as the failure-to-report issue. It teaches employees that it’s OK to do things that put them at risk."
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Silver Bullet?
Employers often consider incentives as a silver bullet that will magically keep workers safe. But they don’t, says Agnew.
What’s more while employees like getting "stuff," they don’t believe incentives influence their daily safety behavior. "I’ve talked to hundreds of employees who tell me that when it gets close to the time of a payout, they may pay more attention, but the rest of the time, not really."
Agnew defines an incentive as a reward that’s tied to something that may happen in the future if one does not engage in a particular behavior. While Agnew is somewhat more positive about using incentives for participation (e.g., joining a fitness program or completing a health risk assessment), she believes there is "something unsavory" about having to pay for safety compliance.
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Think Reinforcement
Agnew prefers the concept of reinforcement to incentives. Reinforcement can take many forms. The most typical is a positive comment. While she believes that praising an employee for working safely is a good idea, Agnew’s view of reinforcement goes further.
She recommends reinforcing an action by making it easier for employees to do. "Often in safety, we make it difficult to do the right thing, like requiring people to sit down and file complicated paperwork to report a hazard." Implementing a hassle-free system, such as a hot line for oral reporting, reinforces the desired action by making it easier.
Reinforcement can be engineered into the work process, or it can be encouraged by the way work is planned.
"If you’ve to money to spend on safety, I would analyze your organizational and management systems and ask what you can do to make it easier and more reinforcing to do the right things," Agnew suggests.
Tomorrow, we’ll present another view of safety incentives, which promotes a blended approach using incentives along with traditional behavior-based feedback and observation.