ARE you looking for a way to increase employee involvement in safety activities and training? Incentive programs can motivate employees to follow safety-related rules, complete required or recommended training, or participate in safety-related activities such as safety committees.
DO safety incentive programs work? This is a multimillion-dollar question when you consider the costs that unsafe practices can have for your organization. The simple answer is, it depends primarily on the focus of your safety program and secondarily on how well you implement your incentive program.
MOST experts agree safety incentive programs can be effective tools for helping to motivate and encourage employees to achieve behavioral changes on the job. Most often, such programs are aimed at reaching multiple goals.
CRITICS of safety incentive programs often fall prey to a simple error in logic: They argue that because such programs do not always work, then they never work. If that is true, then the following statements must also be true:
SUCCEEDING in today's business world requires clearer targets and sharper aim than ever before. This new era of business has ushered in vast changes and new challenges. Recession, higher turnover, increased competition, higher costs, and a changing work ethic have created the need for businesses to recapture the attention of employees and recommit them to quality and productivity.
THE decision facing most corporate managers is not whether to offer incentives to assist in the attainment of important business and safety objectives. For most of these folks, that's a given--incentives work, and they know it. Thus, the real decision comes down to picking the type of incentive that can produce the biggest bang for the buck.