One challenge of talking about motivation is that different people use different labels to refer to different kinds of motivation. So when someone is talking about motivation, it is often hard to figure out what they are referring to, let alone understand their meaning. This is a shame because incentive programs depend on leveraging motivation to focus our employees’ behavior in the direction of increased safety. Without intrinsic motivation, incentives are just a gimmick. That is where the idea of flipping the program comes in.
There are three types of motivation that are important to consider when developing safety incentive programs.