A safety incentive program can encourage employees to practice safe behaviors until they become instinctive, contributing to a stronger culture and reducing harmful incidents. However, a poorly managed safety program can do just the opposite, says Matthew Jacquel, M.S., CSP, CIH, CPCU, ARM, CRIS, vice president and national construction risk control consultant at McGriff.

In his Professional Safety article, “Building an Incentive Program for the Real World,” Jacquel notes that research has found poorly managed safety incentive programs lead to underreporting of injuries, incidents and near misses because workers don’t want to lose a potential reward. This results in “management failing to take corrective actions, thereby increasing the likelihood of repeat incidents or failure to identify serious safety hazards,” Jacquel writes.

In light of these findings, many safety incentive programs have been abandoned. That doesn’t mean safety incentive programs can’t be part of an arsenal of tools used to achieve higher levels of safety. It means they need to be properly executed to achieve the desired outcomes.

To secure success, safety leaders must know what OSHA views as permissible and impermissible safety incentive programs, define their approach and follow best practices for effectively implementing these programs.

How OSHA Defines Permissible Safety Incentive Programs

Safety incentive programs fall under three categories:

• Traditional, Rate-Based Programs: These programs are often problematic because they focus on results and typically reward a team for recording a certain time without an injury, incident or any other quantitative value, Jacquel explains. OSHA generally doesn’t view these programs favorably and they have since lost traction because they can result in underreporting incidents. Who wants to be the one to report an injury a few days away from receiving an award for an injury-free month?
  
  While you can design these programs properly — for example, by ensuring employees are well-trained on their reporting rights and empowering them to report injuries, illnesses, near misses and hazards without retaliation — Jacquel advises organizations to avoid them. Safety incentives based on lagging indicators too often “end up rewarding the wrong behaviors, despite a company’s best efforts to avoid this,” he writes.
  
  
• Behavior-Based Programs: These programs reward employees for taking specific behaviors or actions, such as identifying risky behaviors, completing safety training or observing each other’s operations. While often effective, Jacquel cautions that these programs can deteriorate if an organization uses observations as a tool for punishment and blame, thereby eroding employee trust, or if it focuses primarily on the quantity of observations over their quality.
  
  
• Non-Traditional Programs: While similar to behavior-based programs, these programs have more tangible elements that reward employees for actively participating in activities that improve safety, such as joining a safety committee, recording safety observations or drafting a job hazard analysis, Jacquel says. However, employees may not participate if they see these tasks as additional work for which they are not compensated.

Regardless of which type of safety incentive program — or combination of programs — you want to implement, it should align with OSHA’s guidance. The agency clarified its position in a 2018 memorandum, “ OSHA’s Position on Workplace Incentive Programs and Post-Incident Drug Testing Under 29 CFR § 1904.35(b)(1)(iv),” that indicates a safety incentive program must include the following:

• Evidence that the employer consistently enforces legitimate work rules
• Positive actions taken when a worker reports near misses and hazards
• Steps to encourage involvement in a safety and health management system

While OSHA allows rate-based programs, employers could be cited for such programs if they do not implement adequate precautions to ensure employees feel free to report an injury or illness.

The Six Phases of Safety Incentive Program Implementation

Once you have determined the type of safety incentive program your organization prefers, you can achieve program implementation in six phases, Jacquel says:

1. Gain management support and buy-in. Employees must believe that the program is fair, properly administered and attainable in terms of goals. “A company must ensure management is ready to commit to, administer and actively participate in a safety incentive program prior to implementing one,” Jacquel writes.
2. Conduct a needs analysis. To ensure employee participation, a company must first ask whether the basic needs of the employees have been met. Essentially, do the employees feel accepted, respected and recognized?
3. Design and develop a written program. Make sure it’s accessible to all employees, and define how you will measure program success.
4. Conduct training. This should include training on the program itself as well as traditional safety training.
5. Implement the program. Provide clear guidance on rollout.
6. Evaluate the program. Regularly and rigorously evaluate program effectiveness. Is it meeting goals beyond incident reduction?

Considerations for Safety Incentive Program Rewards

The success of any safety incentive program hinges on the value of the rewards employees receive. What makes a motivating reward? Jacquel offers several research-based considerations:

• Gather employee input. When designing the program, ask employees what incentives would motivate them.
• Make rewards visible. “Rewards should be easy to display, such as hard hat stickers or T-shirts, rather than hidden rewards, such as gift certificates that only the recipient sees,” Jacquel writes. Combining these rewards might offer the most value to employees.
• Involve employees’ families. Rewards that benefit the whole family, such as a grocery store gift certificate, may be more meaningful to employees and help involve the whole family in encouraging employees to act safer.
• Spread out rewards. Motivate as many people as possible by recognizing many employees with small rewards rather than only a few employees with large rewards.
• Focus on individual rewards. Studies show that individual rewards are more influential than group awards.
• The best rewards are extrinsic and intrinsic. Combining extrinsic rewards, such as money, shirts, stickers and hats, with intrinsic rewards, such as sincere public appreciation, is often most compelling.
• Consider the effect of cutoff points. If the cutoff for receiving a reward is reporting an incident, employees may not do so or may decide to stop actively participating once eliminated from the chance to earn a reward.

Finally, remember that while a safety incentive program can help workers develop better safety habits, the program is just one part of an overall safety program and culture.

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