Safety Knights

We do a monthly safety spotlight where we recognize an employee for an exceptional act safe behavior

Make sure it's based on leading metrics so that it doesn't discourage incident reporting. In the past, we based the safety incentives on JSAs being completed for every new job/task, attending 100% of all required trainings, quarterly facility-wide OSH audit score, and a few other things.

We also split the incentive up into quarterly rather than annually. With annual incentives, a person could get all the way to December 31st and get hurt on the last day of the year and lose their incentive, which discredits all the good work they did throughout the whole year. Or vice versa, they could become ineligible in January and feel like there's no point in trying the rest of the year. By doing quarterly programs, they can "mess up" one quarter and still be eligible for the other 3 quarters. It's all about celebrating the small wins.

Just be sure to stay within the OSHA guidelines on your safety incentive program.

My last position had a "Thank You" program that I rolled safety into.

HR had the program setup for Supervisors to thank their employees for their hard work, going above and beyond, etc. I added in a Safety Observation/Suggestion portion to the thank you program.

Anyone that got a thank you card would then get their names placed into a hat at our monthly all hands meetings for the chance to win a gas card.

It started out slow and I got more complaints than legitimate suggestions and observations, but it slowly gained traction and started to become a good resource for continuous safety improvement!

I would walk around after the workers had left and put sticky notes on their workstations with simple thank you messages. It was random, not on any schedule, and very much appreciated. It made me smile to see those sticky notes still affixed to the workstation days/weeks later. If you go this route, I would say to buy the industrial strength post-it notes and use a Sharpie.

I developed a safety incentive program that consisted of 5 metrics. Each metric had a point value. Employees would earn points each month and have the option to redeem there points for rewards after 6 months or no later than one year.

The rewards came from a recognition management company called Terryberry. They developed our own custom website that every employee had to register. Employees would login to the website and select whatever reward the wanted based on there points.

The rewards would ship directly to the employees. This was a hit but someone has to manage and upload the points each month. Maybe 30 minutes to a hour monthly based on the number of employees in your company.

I have seen really good programs (setup as Drew mentioned) and I've seen many "bloody hand in the pocket" programs. I agree they need to focus on metrics that encourage safety. Most of these use leading indicators (observations completed, JSAs finished, safety policies updated, etc.).

I proposed a tri-fold program that focused on individual, Division, and Department and they were to be given out quarterly. This way if someone has a bad day, it doesn't affect their whole year. Also, you need to avoid incentives that penalize all for the sake of one. Say if everyone on the team goes preventable incident-free for the quarter then everyone gets XYZ. But if that team has one incident then the whole team is penalized (hence the bloody hand in the pocket or take your co-worker to the walk-in day).

I could write a book on incentives that I've seen or been a part of that left me questioning the validity and the reason behind some of those programs.

The only one that I will talk about was even called "The Glove Program." If a crew (at the mine) went a month without a preventable incident, then the whole crew got gloves. We were literally "holding safety hostage." After a year, I remember asking my boss, "So if I have an injury then I don't get to receive PPE that I need to do my job safely???" We quickly abolished the program and went to an individual debit/rewards system.

Good luck!

We have a system where you specify points for different types of safety-related activities, such as reporting praise or prevention safety observations, participating in incident investigations, getting a certification, completing training, etc. You can also manually award points for things that aren't automatically tracked. The system automatically tracks the points awarded, as well as what the points were for. So, not only can this be used as a safety incentive program, but also serves as a good metric for annual reviews. As many have said in prior comments...leading metrics!!

On our project we were seeing a large increase in property and equipment damages. We were getting frustrated and worked with the safety committee to come up with a near miss/ hazard reporting incentive program. Worker would submit any of these on a card, but to qualify they needed to implement or help implement a corrective action. Damage incidents went down and worker involvement increased. We did a weekly draw for a gift card to Starbucks, Tim Hortons amd others

I would urge you to involve your employees in the design and implementation of any incentive programs. My best ones I did exactly that! The more they thought it was "THEIR Program" the more successful it will be.