Everybody agrees that rewards work. It's no secret that rewards and recognition are powerful motivators of employee performance—and that includes safety performance. That's why safety incentive programs have been around for a long time now and have been popular with both management and employees. Most safety experts support the incentive concept and agree that good individual and/or group safety performance should be rewarded in some way. If it's done right, a company's overall safety performance should improve. The only area of disagreement—and it's a big one—is how incentive programs should be structured to do the most good.

Rewarding only for results can backfire. In the past, most safety incentive programs have been based on results. This type of program rewards individual employees, teams, or work groups for not having accidents. Great idea. But there's a problem. Human nature being what it is, if you tell employees that they'll get a tangible reward or some kind of recognition if they don't have an accident, but nothing if they do have an accident, what's likely to happen? Some workers who have accidents or near misses aren't going to report the incidents because they don't want to lose their prize. Unreported accidents mean uncorrected hazards that will eventually lead to future accidents. OSHA and many labor unions have been highly critical of results-oriented incentive programs for this very reason. Another problem with incentive programs based on results is that some workplace accidents are not caused by unsafe acts. So an employee who gets in an accident through no fault of his or her own, and thereby loses a reward, is effectively penalized by the incentive system. That's not fair and not a good way to encourage safe behavior.

How the most effective programs work. In recent years, in part because of criticism from OSHA and other organizations interested in workplace safety, and in part because of failure of results-oriented programs to achieve desired results, many employers have been implementing a different type of safety incentive program. These newer programs shift the focus to safe behavior and safety-related activities rather than results. For example, an employee might be recognized and rewarded for:

• Being observant and reporting safety problems
• Taking action to correct or eliminate safety hazards in their work areas and in their jobs
• Making suggestions for improving workplace safety
• Participating in safety committees

Although some programs continue to include a zero-accident component in addition to these other factors, even then, the emphasis is still on means rather than ends.