By James Hinton
Director, EHS&Q
We all know how Safety incentive programs are utilized to increases our employee’s participation in Safety in the workplace and to help promote safety, but does this strategy work? Some recent studies have shown what all safety professionals know, which is that they DO work! The issue is that the studies show excellent results in short term, but, as the programs linger in time, the benefits of the programs do not last long.
Safety incentive programs need replenishing. So many times companies put a plan in place, see immediate results and then the plan diminishes over the months and years. So how do we fix this problem and keep employees participating in incentive programs at work? Just like with any program we must keep people interested in the incentives to keep the motivation going to continue the benefits of a safer work environment and workers actively participating. There are hundreds of firms that help with creating and maintaining company incentive programs, but there are also some things we as the safety professionals can do as well within our organization.
Switching things up just a little can rekindle the motivation in the incentive program, this can be in the form of additional incentives being added, changing the incentive items every so often, even getting the employees to add incentives to the programs can be utilized. The whole point in the long term success of a safety incentive program is that if we just do the basics the program will only give a short term return on investment and a long term solution would still need to be found, but if we can keep the motivation in the program you can turn the program into a more permanent solution to safety motivation performance within the organization.