Improving Your Safety
With a Behavioral Approach
(Reprinted from Hydrocarbon Processing)

Establish safety incentives

Terry E. McSween

You have several options in designing safety incentives:

• Create a safety award process.
• Support the safety process through the existing compensation process.
• Provide incentive compensation based on the safety process.

Traditional safety award programs often pay off people who take chances, or they may encourage employees to not report accidents accurately. Too many people simply role the dice. The chance on injury is usually so low that they will not get hurt, even though they take chances. In an award program based on going a fixed time period without an accident, they will usually get the same award as other employees that always comply with safety procedures. In addition, if the award is significant, particularly if the award is significant to a group of employees, such programs may discourage honest reporting of minor accidents.

To avoid these shortcomings, safety awards and incentive should be based primarily on maintaining the safety process. In addition, small awards can be provided for maintaining a safe workplace as measured by observation data, perhaps in combination with no lost-time accidents. The safety award process provides a way of celebrating your successes and saying thanks to those employees who work safely and those that make special contributions.

Safety Awards - Rule of Thumb 1: Provide safety awards for safe behavior on the job and for behaviors related to maintaining the safety process (observations, conducting safety meetings, setting safety goals, etc.).

Safety Awards - Rule of Thumb 2: Keep safety awards and incentives small. Your awards should be significant enough to support compliance, but not significant enough to generate false recording.

These rules are especially critical because of recent court decisions. An employee in Texas recently won a worker's compensation cases against an employer who had a safety award program that discouraged employees from accurately reporting accidents. Depending on other aspects of a company's loss prevention efforts, an incentive that encourages an employee not to report an accident may increase a company's liability should an employee have an accident. Such an incentive certainly increases an employee's ability to successfully file a compensation claim well after the typical time period established for such claims.

Regardless of the kind of award system you design, you will have to create an internal marketing campaign to promote your safety effort with employees. You will want to consider posters, announcements in safety meetings, articles in newsletters, and other methods of promoting and communicating the award process. Table 7 shows various options for safety awards. You may obviously choose to combine several of the options. For example, you might combine a concurrent safety award program with a social awards process along with one of the compensation options.

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This article first appeared in Hydrocarbon Processing (August 1993) and is reproduced here with permission.