5 Reasons Why Safety Incentives Do Not Work

Your incentive program may actually be preventing your employees from buying-in to safety. Here are 5 reasons why.

5 reasons why safety incentives do not work by kevin burns

You may have fallen under the impression that safety incentives, paying your people (in either cash or prizes) to achieve Zero, may actually work. Well let me say right here that safety incentives do not work - ever.

Safety managers somehow want to believe that there is a magic bullet when it comes to driving incident numbers down. Since they can’t seem to get workers to stop making mistakes, they mistakenly believe that you can solve any problem by throwing money at it. If money were at the top of the list of what employees actually want from their work, then incentives might work. But money actually finishes in 7th place on the list of things employees want from their jobs - it’s not even in the top 3. So you are blowing past the top 6 things that your employees want from their work to give them the 7th thing on the list.

Dan Pink, in his book Drive, extolled the science behind incentives known since the 1945. He concludes that, “there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” Even though science has proven that incentives don’t work to change behavior, companies still do it.

Here then, are five more reasons why safety incentives don’t work:

1Incentives Make Employees Greedy - safety incentives don’t teach employees how to look out for the well-being of themselves and their co-workers. Incentives don’t drive learning and values and personal investment in performance. Safety incentives only make people avoid incidents - which is far different that buying-in to safety. Greed leads to under-reporting incidents and near-misses to avoid losing incentive bonuses. Some employees refuse to work with other employees for fear of losing their bonus.

2You Hired Wrong - If you have to pay your people to look out for their own safety and the safety of others, if the only reason your employees are choosing to make safety a priority at work is because you are putting a few extra dollars in their paychecks, then you hired wrong. Your HR department needs a re-think. Truthfully, the right people, the employees who believe in and buy-in to safety as personal value, do it regardless of whether or not they’re being paid. Those are the people you need to recruit and hire.

3Management Improves Performance Better Than Incentives - if two companies are utilizing the same incentive program and one is getting great results and the other gets poor results, then it’s not the incentive program to blame. It is management of the safety program that is the differentiator. Better management in safety gets better results - regardless of incentives. Do not attribute your safety success to the incentive program. An incentive program on top of poor safety management will always fail. 

4There’s No Incentive To Take Safety Home - the incentive is to be safe while at work. Why then, should your people buy-in to safety as a personal value? There’s no incentive to be safe at home which creates a greater chasm between compliance and safety buy-in. People don’t give a great safety performance at work and ignore it at home. The real measure of a safety program is in what people do with safety when they leave work. Crediting your current incentive program with your improved safety performance short-changes your managers who are doing an excellent job.

5Safety Needs To Be The Expectation - a safety incentive should never be viewed as a performance bonus or as something you are rewarded for. Perfect Safety should be the expectation - the rule rather than the exception. It should be a condition of employment. If workers actually improve their performance for money, then they weren't giving their best. Either that, or your managers were willing to accept less than the employee’s best performance. Either way, cash won’t fix it.

The solution to improving safety is to not do more of the wrong things but to start doing some of the right things. Science proves that incentives actually retard performance. Stop doing it. 

To successfully achieve Zero, companies have got to look outside of safety to fix safety. In my post, 5 Parts to Zero-Safety: Why The 80-20 Rule Is Preventing Zero, I wrote why successful safety performance requires attention to five differing areas of your organization - not just more money. Don’t give all the credit to cash. That’s a terrible way to appreciate your good managers and good employees.

People will start buying-in to safety when they begin to value their own contributions and are recognized for the work they do. If you want help with getting your people to buy-in to safety, call me and let's start a conversation. I answer my own phone.

(c) Can Stock Photo

Topics: safety speaker, safety, safety buy-in