10 ways to reinvent your safety incentive program

Safety Incentives are increasingly eyed with suspicion by regulators who worry inappropriate incentives might lead to under reporting of injuries. Unfortunately, many organizations have legacy systems that provide financial rewards for injury-free time periods. These rewards rapidly become seen as entitlements. If you find yourself in this situation take heart, you can easily change the incentives to encourage people to engage in activities that will lead to safer outcomes. When you make changes to your incentive programs follow these 10 guidelines that will help you create effective incentives.

1. Limit the Scope. Whatever incentive(s) you create must be fairly limited to scope. Link the incentive to a very specific behavior. The behavior should be clearly attributable to a proactive behavior by the associates eligible for the incentive. You must be careful that the behavior cannot be plausibly the result of other external factors. For example, reductions in Incident Rates could be the result of the behavior could just as easily be attributed to under-reporting of injuries or even chance.
2. Select a Behavior that is Completely Within the Employee’s Control. When we create an incentive that is outside the control of the employee we create an incentive for people to lie, cheat, and steal. Don’t believe me? Hold people accountable for sales.
3. Link the Incentive to Reduction of Risk. By creating an incentive that directly correlates to the reduction of risk, you engage the worker in risk reduction and workplace safety. Imagine the benefits of having a significant portion of your workforce actively looking for ways to reduce risk.
4. Consider Possible Undesirable Outcomes. Too often we create incentives that not only encourage a desired outcome but also encourage behaviors that we never saw coming and don’t want; its important to do serious analysis of other behaviors that might be undesirable or even dangerous or illegal.
5. Make Sure the Behavior Can Be Measured and Tracked. Incentives should be like SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based), and the more the behavior can be measurable and tracked the more likely people will participate and be successful.
6. Make it Personal. Team incentives may be easier to administrate, but that convenience comes at the cost of individual control over one’s fate. By linking the incentive to a behavior that is performed by an individual you provide true motivation and you reduce animosity among team members who might be unhappy about losing an incentive because of poor performer of another.
7. Provide Equal Opportunity to Succeed. Anything you link to the incentive should be equally accessible to all associates eligible for the incentive. If some of the workforce is excluded from participating it can lead to dysfunctional competition and cries of foul play.
8. Avoid Outcome-Based Criteria for Success. Sales incentives are classic outcome-based incentive systems and they are universally stupid. Sales professionals can control how many face-to-face appointments they make, they can control how many cold calls they make, they can even (to some extent) control how many quotes they write, but they can’t control the outcome (sales). Show me a salesman who is having a rough sales year and I will show you a salesperson who is at least tempted to lie, cheat, and backstab. But if you reward individual behavior-based activities instead of the result you will encourage people to work hard to behave in a certain way that is likely to produce positive outcomes.
9. Don’t Make the New Criteria for Reward Harder than the One It Replaces. This tip is easier than it seems. When you replace the old incentive (that is outside the person’s control) with an incentive that is within people’s control you guarantee that it is easier to achieve. You will likely have to do some heavy promotion of a change to ensure
10. Put a Positive Spin On the Change. Whatever you decide to do, you have to be sure that the new incentive system isn’t seen as a take away or as a punishment.