By Thomas E. (Ted) Boyce, PhD

For 120 years, behavioral scientists have been able to demonstrate that behaviors are triggered by events that come before them (activators) and are either strengthened or weakened as a function of the outcomes they produce for the performer (consequences). This model is often discussed as the ABC model of behavior change and has been described in much more detail by me elsewhere (cf. https://goo.gl/AxSr0b). So what does this have to do with safety incentives?

Put simply, in practice, an incentive is a promise (activator) of a reward (consequence) given certain behavior. Yet, this is not how many safety incentive programs are set up. Sure, in most corporate-based incentive programs, leadership promises a reward. However, this reward is most often dependent on achieving a certain outcome (e.g., the absence of injuries), not directly on the behaviors that should produce that outcome. When structuring incentives this way, leaders make the assumption that the outcome can only be achieved if the desired behaviors occurred. Yet, this is not always the case. Safety incentives provide a great example of this.

Specifically, how might one obtain the “absence of an injury” that is so often tied to safety incentives? I can think of three ways:

1. Employees engaged in safe behavior reliably enough to avoid injury;
2. Employees did not report injuries that could be hidden; or
3. We were just plain lucky.

It is numbers 2 and 3 that concern me and that have also caused many safety incentive programs to attract the attention of OSHA. OSHA cares about underreporting, and underreporting is even more likely when individual incentive payouts are dependent on everyone on a crew or team not having an injury.

You can avoid these traps if your safety incentive program focuses on behavior. Consider this example: Company A has experienced an uptick in recordable hand injuries due to a failure of employees to reliably wear proper gloves. In addition, they have seen some recordable eye injuries because face shields were not used when they should have been. A traditional outcome-based safety incentive program would promise a reward to every employee who did not get hurt during a specified period of time (say 3 months). That is, the criterion for payout is not having an injury for 3 months, regardless of how this is achieved. In contrast, a behavior-focused incentive program would involve the employees in defining the needed behavior change (glove use and use of face shields), tracking it, and monitoring it, and would reward improvements in observed levels of these behaviors. With the latter, we leave less to chance.

So why don’t businesses adopt such a strategy? For several reasons:

1. The perceived difficulty in defining and measuring the critical safety targets;>/li>
2. A perception that monitoring behaviors gets in the way of production; and
3. The need to address issues getting in the way of safe behavior as they are identified in real time; and
4. Tradition. In the end, it boils down to cost (effort) versus benefit.

This brings us full-circle to the ABCs with which I started the article. Specifically, this paper is an activator to get you to engage in the behaviors of changing how you operate your safety incentive program. The consequences that should motivate the behavior change are still unknown to you, as you may not have first-hand experience with them. So, at some level, you need to take a leap of faith with me. Perhaps it would help if I told you that OSHA estimates the average work-related injury to cost $46K, and that most companies that adopt a behavior-focused process see a 50 percent reduction in injuries within one year. I will also mention that one client with whom I’ve worked recently reduced their insurance premium by $300K a year as a result of engaging in such practices for 6 months. Yes, the impact on your bottom line will be tremendous. But the non-economic benefits of more employee engagement in safety, improved morale, and less absenteeism and turnover are even greater.