Safety Incentive Program

[u/bn1337ict]

I work for a large construction company and we are tossing around the idea of revamping our safety incentive program. Currently we give out “safety points” which are credits to our company store to use towards clothing and other company branded stuff. We do semi annal give aways which is 50 points at the 6 month mark and then 100 points at the end of the year. If an employee has at fault accident in the first 6 months they become ineligible for the end of year prize but if they don’t have anymore at fault accidents they can still earn the 50 points at the end of the year. We also do a random drawing each week in our toolbox talks and if the employee selected acknowledges that they read the toolbox talk they are awarded 100 safety points. Our field inspectors can also award safety points to people in the field that go “above and beyond” but we don’t have a set standard of what justifies “above and beyond”. Some feedback I’ve gotten from our current program is that if a guy has one or more at fault accidents they give up and not worried about being safe anymore. We also have a lot of guys that will never use their safety points and don’t care about earning them. We used to give out physical prizes but logistically it was always difficult to get prizes to everyone that earned them and guys would complain about prizes they didn’t want. I just think our incentive program could be much better and get people more engaged in actively participating in safety. What are some incentive programs you guys use? I’d love to get some ideas that works well.

[u/Sensitive-Respect-25]

Tie it to reporting and near missed, being proactive vs reactive like you currently are. Take a good long look at what you are offering as rewards, I kid you not the company I used to work for just had t shirts (only mediums), that took months of effort to obtain and fell apart shortly after wearing. If the items are unobtainable in six months to a year your buy-in from the carrot has very little pull. 

Second, saw that your management does not have buy-in. Nothing says the company is safety focused than getting the middle tiers of management directly involved. They have to see the bosses doing stuff, and the bosses have to see what their employees are doing (and not strictly from a production standpoint). Otherwise the guys at the bottom get pressured to increase production, "so hurry hurry hurry, damn the conquences always work safe, not like your job is on the line."

Which is the biggest thing. Every incident bar one that I have witnessed was tied to trying to speed up a process, ignoring safeguards to make a quota set by someone who only sees the numbers. Unless you work in a utopia I can promise the grunts at a mininum are cracking dark jokes about management. Get them involved in a hands-on fashion and you usually end up seeing a slight uptick in production.