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Do safety incentives work?

They can, but an expert on safe working environments says a broader perspective is needed

Anyone who has worked for a manufacturer with a safety program is probably in possession of a mug, hat, or jacket that commemorates some safety goal. In many instances, the award is to mark a certain number of consecutive days worked without an injury that would warrant a report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). On other occasions, the trinkets might mark simple involvement in a safety awareness program.

Because these types of incentives tied to safety programs are commonplace in manufacturing, you might think that they are the most important aspects of forward-thinking safety awareness campaigns. That, apparently, isn’t the case.

John Dony is the director of the Campbell Institute, a part of the National Safety Council that runs the annual Campbell Awards, which honor companies that have environmental, health, and safety (EHS) programs that are thoroughly integrated into organizational operations and result in high levels of employee safety. In the eight years he has worked with the awards program, Dony has observed what organizations do to improve and sustain a safe work environment. The FABRICATOR asked him his thoughts on what role safety incentives play for these and other manufacturing companies.

The FABRICATOR: What roles do incentives play for a manufacturer looking to bolster safety awareness? Are incentives necessary?

John Dony: It’s an interesting question. There are a lot of takes on that.

There is always going to be a need to continue to focus attention and to sustain an effort. So when you start your journey from a safety perspective, for a lot of organizations, that’s reactionary. It stems from something happening and needing to deal with the outcome of that. When you get to the other end of the maturity spectrum, you tend to be more proactive. You tend to be more interested in sustaining things that are already in place to prevent things before they happen, to read the signals that are coming around the bend.

Everyone, whether it’s a leader or an employee on the shop floor, needs to have their attention refocused to sustain the effort that they are putting into things. And you can do that any number of different ways. That’s what communication and training are all about. It’s to refocus our attention and to keep our awareness there—to keep us motivated and moving.

Incentives play a similar role. The real crux of this is not whether incentives are a necessary or non-necessary component; it’s what your intent in using them for is and what outcome you are incentivizing. It’s also being fully aware of all of the outcomes that can come from that.

What I mean by that is that if you are incentivizing the wrong thing or using the wrong kind of incentive, then you are potentially going to create a negative outcome. Your original intent was to keep the focus on safety and sustain that effort, but you may have created a whole host of things that weren’t your intent. Going into that kind of approach without that knowledge is going to be really dangerous.

FAB: Can you provide an example?

Dony: Sure. If you are trying to drive down the number of people that are getting hurt on the job, one relatively simple way of looking at that is that you are trying to prevent a recordable injury from happening as defined by OSHA. What that potentially leads to—while the intent there may be good—is that we don’t want anyone to get hurt. What it could lead to, however, for the manager or the supervisor is a message of “We don’t want any recordable injuries.” That can then create a culture where in fact you may end up incentivizing employees not to report when things happen as opposed to having a more open reporting culture that leads you to find the things that potentially could have a much more harmful effect. This might be an oil slick that goes unreported for a week, and then someone slips on it and breaks their leg. If our goal is to prevent the person from breaking their leg, is incentivizing toward zero recordable injuries really the right thing to do?

That’s probably the simplest potential negative outcome. That’s something that can creep up on you very quickly.

FAB: Some manufacturers want employees to report more unsafe work conditions and incidents with the hope of keeping everyone constantly thinking of working safely. Can incentives help this in a positive way?

Dony: They can. I would say that if you are supporting or encouraging reporting, that’s a very positive thing in general. However, it could be a double-edged sword. A negative result could be that if a company has a goal of a dozen reports per employee this year and achieving that goal results in an incentive, it could lead to a lot of low-quality reports. You see a lot of people checking boxes. They see it as paperwork that needs to get done, rather than a really important exercise. Even incentivizing something positive can potentially lead to a lot of wheels spinning and lot of time spent managing paper instead of managing problems.

FAB: Have you seen any difference between the use of monetary and nonmonetary incentives in trying to increase safety awareness in a manufacturing company?

Dony: Obviously, money is a powerful motivator, but it is also a motivator that is too powerful in a lot of ways. Considering potential negative outcomes, it might not be right to go in that direction.

Typically for the high-performing organizations within the Campbell Institute, the nonmonetary incentives are the ones that we see more often. That could be as simple as stickers, coins, pizza parties, lunches, or face time with leaders of organizations. And it’s not about the token. It’s about what is behind the token and how heartfelt that is.

Some people look at this and say that all incentives are potentially problematic, and that could be true in terms of what you are incentivizing. Why are you doing it, and how are you doing it? But if you are dead-set on doing an incentivized program, a nonmonetary program is a more reasonable way to start.

FAB: Do people of various ages react differently to incentives?

Dony: I don’t know that there is a whole lot of research that I’ve seen that looks at the age differential. I will say that certainly a hot topic in the EHS field is how different demographics react to different things and communication styles. I would suspect that there is some differentiation in how they respond to incentive programs as well.

But I think it’s universal that people respond to positive motivation. That seems to hold pretty true with everyone.

FAB: Does the success of any type of incentive program depend on the actions of upper management?

Dony: I would say that there are a lot of theories and models out there that culture begins with leadership or that leaders cast a big shadow on an individual site or facility. But at the same time, a lot of members of the Campbell Institute and more mature organizations realize that it’s a two-way street.

You don’t generate culture in a vacuum. You don’t generate support for EHS or any other program in a vacuum. You can have a very well-thought-out and sound program that’s created in an office somewhere, but when it’s put out in the field, and if the folks doing the work aren’t engaged, it won’t matter how good the program may or may not be. The secret is to have engagement from all sides to make relative change.

Members of the institute offer good examples of employee-owned programs that may have been cooked up on the corporate side somewhere, but the shop floor and those engaged in the day-to-day work determine how it’s executed and how it’s run.

As far as how incentives support that, from my own perspective, if you have someone empowered and owning something, knowing that they can go in and make a change and that their voice will be heard, that is a much more powerful supporting element that any sticker or dollar value that you can place on something. This seems to hold true for a lot of organizations that we work with.

That’s not to say that incentives can’t be a supporting mechanism, but I think that you can buy a vote or you can generate a vote with someone’s heart or someone’s mind. It’s much more sustainable to have gotten that vote with real good intent through someone’s heart or mind rather than with even the most nonmonetary token incentive.

FAB: Do larger companies have an advantage over smaller ones in being able to dedicate EHS people to develop and sustain these nonincentivized safety efforts?

Dony: It’s a good question. There is always going to be the question of resourcing. Even in larger organizations, this question is often asked: Do we have the right number of people working on this? Do we have too few or too many?

As someone in my own organization who has to wear a couple of hats, I find it’s really hard to build engagement or ownership of something when it’s just part of your job and not your entire job.

I can certainly see a case being made for incentives as a more powerful tool when it is a shortcut for smaller organizations wanting to draw attention to some desired action.

Wellness programs are a classic example of that. A lot of organizations don’t have a fleet of full-time wellness professionals. Very often it’s the human resources person or someone on the EHS committee who is engaged in that. And a lot of classic incentives get used for things like wellness programs, such as reductions in premiums. So, yeah, I can certainly see a case being made for small organizations. You have less of an ability to build that buy-in day in and day out. Incentives can be a much more useful opportunity for you to do a variety of different things.

I don’t know if it’s a matter of scale. It’s certainly a matter of how many other things you are being tasked with doing and how many other things that you can focus on a day-to-day basis if you are leading a program or running an initiative like that.

FAB: Any words of advice for a company examining its use of incentives as part of its safety program?

Dony: My overall message is that we really need to think about any tool we want to use and the potential consequences of it. If you just think about the positives connected to a particular incentive, it leaves you really blind to the potential negatives you could be creating right below the surface.

It’s not whether a particular incentive is right or wrong or useful or not useful. If you are using something without thinking it through, you are in for a pretty interesting time.

John Dony is director, the Campbell Institute, National Safety Council, 1121 Spring Lake Drive, Itasca, IL 60143, 630-285-1121, campbellinstitute@nsc.org, www.thecampbellinstitute.org.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Dan Davis

Editor-in-Chief

2135 Point Blvd.

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8281

Dan Davis is editor-in-chief of The Fabricator, the industry's most widely circulated metal fabricating magazine, and its sister publications, The Tube & Pipe Journal and The Welder. He has been with the publications since April 2002.