Workplace Safety Incentives Since 1991
Often, a company interested in utilizing Safety Pays will raise the following issue: Won’t strong safety incentives result in employees hiding their injuries? In fact, this issue has been carefully worked-out in the Safety Pays incentive design and has been time-tested successfully for over 20 years!
Obviously, all responsible safety managers want to ensure their employees receive the proper medical treatment when an incident occurs. Therefore, when using a comprehensive incentive program, management wants to be sure the approach used isn’t so strong that a misguided worker becomes somehow motivated to do the wrong thing… in this case, hide an injury or fail to report it in a timely fashion.
To address this issue, the Safety Pays program includes a number of custom designed elements to prevent such a situation from ever taking place. To start with, we recommend our "lost-time" rules for those managers concerned with the possibility of such negative employee motivation. As applied, these rules penalize only those injuries which result in an employee being absent from work for longer than 24 hours. Meanwhile, the employee is encouraged to seek medical attention anytime there is an injury or an ailment.
The point is that just because a doctor or clinic’s care is provided, it does not necessarily drop the jackpot. Only when a worker does not report to work the following day is there a jackpot reduction. In the meantime, even if the employee’s injury requires a work reduction; he/she may still be present at work through modified duties. As a result, $afety Pay$ encourages employees to remain an active part of the workforce while getting the medical help they need.
The Safety Pays program doesn’t stop there. To further address the issue of non-reporting, Safety Pays has built-in safeguards, such as the Game Card Sign-In Roster, which regularly requires employees to sign-off certifying they have had no work-related injuries during the previous game round. We also urge our clients to issue game Safety Violations, which cancel an employee’s right to participate in the game (not to mention possible probation, suspension or termination) for non-reporting.
Few employees would risk losing their jobs for the sake of a bingo game. Furthermore, unlike most safety incentive programs, this is not an all-or-nothing approach -- someone wins something every month regardless of whether or not a group member has had an accident. Caps can also be placed on the jackpot payouts high enough to foster a healthy peer pressure environment, but not so high as to create an unhealthy competitive spirit.
For those companies that have high exposure to repetitive motion incidents, we recommend including only injuries as the result of accidents not illnesses or cumulative trauma, in the incentive program, or to apply a behavioral approach that rewards individuals for safe work practices and discourages unsafe activities.
As a final point, consider that after a number of years of implementing the Safety Pays program in virtually every commercial and industrial environment (with nearly 10,000 companies nationwide), we have yet to have any client report an incident going unreported. The bottom line is that incentives play a crucial role in assuring overall effectiveness in a company’s safety program.
We often compare a safety program as the “car” and safety incentives as the gas that powers the car. Sure, gasoline is inherently dangerous if not handled properly, but can you imagine living without it. Of course not! So, when utilized properly and in the fashion for which it is designed, an effective safety incentive program is not just an invaluable tool but, just like gasoline, virtually an everyday necessity.
Safety Pays has demonstrated repeatedly over the years that it is, by far, the most effective responsible motivational approach currently used in the workplace. And we have every confidence that each Safety Pays client will receive the full benefit of what this program offers, in the same way so many other companies have succeeded in reducing, if not eliminating incidents, without the worry of employee non-reporting. But don't take our word for it! For proof, view these actual letters from customers explaining how Safety Pays avoids injury hiding.