Health & Safety Incentive Schemes
As many of you probably know, all companies have certain health & safety obligations that they need to fulfil by law. Though the requirements vary according to the industry, with high-risk sectors understandably requiring a wider range of precautions and safety measures, every shape and size of organisation needs to abide by the relevant legislation. Simple as that.
Or is it?
Reducing the frequency of accidents and ensuring that numbers stay low isn’t (or at least shouldn’t) just be about compliance. It should be about promoting a health & safety culture that makes employees more engaged and more motivated to work safely and therefore more productive and more satisfied in their jobs overall. This requires, first and foremost, a real commitment to health & safety principles on the part of HSE practitioners as well as management, who need to lead by example. But that’s only the first step. They then need to foster and instil the same commitment among the workforce, which is often no easy task. The key is finding innovative but, above all, effective ways of ensuring that safety becomes something that every employee willingly strives to achieve.
The argument for H&S incentives: engagement that produces real results
The idea that an individual will be more willing to perform a certain action or complete a task when they get something out of it is not a new one. The fact that presenting them with a reward for good behaviour (positive reinforcement) is more effective than punishing them for bad behaviour is also one that has attracted widespread acceptance since the days of B.F. Skinner.
So can it work in Health & Safety matters?
According to the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) and numerous other exponents of the theory, it can. In its guidance, the HSE backs giving staff incentives and provides documentation outlining the different types of rewards that employers can consider, including:
- One-off prizes
- Monthly gift vouchers (cash prize or gift voucher)
- Moral incentive schemes (charity donations)
- Safety raffles
- "Knock off early on a Friday" hour schemes
- "There and then" rewards for single acts
You may find some of these more appealing than others. For example, the idea of making donations to a charity to reward safe behaviour may be more palatable to you than giving individual employees direct pay-outs for reduced accident numbers or increased near-miss reports. Such a scheme can simultaneously support your CSR agenda and not just raise the profile of health & safety in your organisation, but raise the profile of your company among industry peers.
Personal preferences aside, different kinds of reward and incentive schemes have been shown to have positive results in the past. As long as goals are set responsibly and with thought, an incentive programme can be a highly valuable component of your health & safety strategy. Firstly, they fulfil a basic human need for acknowledgement and affirmation, which makes people engage at a higher level and want to contribute more. Secondly, they positively motivate people to take ownership of goals and recognise what kind of behaviour is needed to get there. Combined, these aspects lead to increased levels of safety as well as higher morale among employees.
Those who refuse to recognise these facts, argue incentive supporters, are simply guilty of scare-mongering and penny-pinching, refusing to make investments into schemes that will ultimately result in much more substantial savings by the business in the long-run.
The argument against H&S incentives: the means taking focus away from the real end
Practitioners on the other side of the debate point out that the focus too often gets shifted on what is supposed to be only a means (i.e. the reward) to the detriment of the actual end (i.e. the safe behaviour or safe result). What this means is that they get so fixated on the reward that their performance actually gets worse, meaning that rewards can actually be counterproductive, if not outright damaging.
In a recent blog post, a consultant from Hastam Health & Safety - a specialist provider of behavioural health & safety training - commented that:
"… one of the most thoroughly researched findings in social psychology is that the more you reward someone for doing something, the less interest that person will tend to have in whatever he or she was rewarded to do."
So at best, they will achieve nothing; at worst, they will actually make people act less safely. And this ties into the other main criticism of incentive schemes, which is that they do not actually reduce the number of accidents, but rather encourage non-reporting in a way that makes it seem like there are fewer accidents. Again, the problem is pinpointed as being that the desire to achieve the reward makes people more prone to act unethically, cheat and think in the short-term. And this can translate into employees fudging results in a way that makes no tangible difference to how safe their behaviour or their work environment actually is.
The truth of the matter is that it depends a lot on how the scheme is designed. Incentives that reward results, such as reducing the number of accidents in the workplace, are more or less bound to be taken advantage of by individuals who are only interested in the prize. The key is to design a system that is much more difficult to cheat, and the way to do this is by rewarding behaviour – not results. After all, it is not so much hazards themselves that make the workplace unsafe - it’s how people approach those hazards that makes the real difference.
The conclusion we can draw is that an incentive system can be a valuable portion of a Health & Safety programme, but only if properly designed. Organisations need to start by considering whether such as system fits in with their organisational culture and the schemes they have introduced in other areas. They need to ensure management is committed and, if possible, to pick a reliable partner with which to design a system that will reward the right kind of behaviour. Finally, they need to think like a business and keep a close eye of results: a reward system that has measurable impact is worth the investment, but one that isn’t performing should be set aside in favour of a more appropriate tool.