Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Wayne’s book Safety Incentives.

There is no more hotly-debated issue in safety than safety incentive programs. Are they good, bad, harmful to safety, flawed or just bad practice? There’s no question that incentive programs have mixed results. Some see the failures as reaffirmation that the concept of incentives is inherently flawed. I’ll render a quick sketch of that view.

Incentive Program Failures

There’s a company in Ohio called Wilbert Company that went through what many organizations do when they try to structure a long-term and short-term approach to safety incentives and recognition. Wilbert’s CEO describes the experience:

“If employees went a month without an accident, they’d get tickets to a lottery drawing for things like TVs or cash equivalent.”  … It went well for a while, but eventually the accident rate would go up again unless we boosted the size of the prize. It just kept growing. Eventually, we stopped it after a few years.”

After the first failure, Wilbert undertook a second attempt to initiate an incentive approach to safety. According to the CEO: “Exactly the same thing happened…. We dropped the program in less than two years.” Not surprisingly, the two failures left the company jaded about incentives. “We didn’t try it a third time, and have never heard of a successful program that could be sustained.”

It’s precisely these types of experiences and comments which make skeptics of behavioral approaches stand up and say, “I told you so.” Indeed, some would suggest it is the height of paternalism to constantly try to come up with new and innovative ways to motivate workers.

Learning from the Failures

Is the idea of offering safety incentives intrinsically flawed as an approach? Or is the failure attributable to the execution of the idea? One problem is that the incentive programs are devised by management and aimed at the rank-and-file worker. One can question whether incentives can ever work in this situation.

Sometimes it comes down to control. As Alfie Kohn has observed:

“Clearly, punishments are harsher and more overt; there is no getting around the intent to control in the ‘Do this or else here’s what will happen to you’ approach. But rewards simply control through seduction rather than force. In the final analysis, they are not one bit less controlling since, like punishments, they are typically used to induce or pressure people to do things they would not freely do—or rather, things that the controller believes they would not freely do. That is why one of the most important (and unsettling) things we can recognize is that the real choice for us is not between rewards and punishments, but between either a version of behavior manipulation, on the one hand, and an approach that does not rely on command and control, on the other.”

If we accept Kohn’s logic, what then become the practical applications of incentives, recognition and rewards? There is a growing body of research and real world experience indicating that not only are incentive, motivational and merit approaches ineffective, they may even be harmful. While generally well-intentioned in their efforts to recognize good performance, they can potentially have the opposite effect.

Conclusion

The greatest management conceit, according to author, Peter R. Scholtes, is that we can motivate people. We can’t, Scholtes asserts. Motivation is there, inside people. Our people are motivated when we hire them and they come to work every day with the intention of doing a good job. In positing that workers are withholding effort that they won’t deliver without being bribed by prospects of recognition and reward, incentives represent the height of management cynicism. “The greatest waste of managerial time is spent trying to manipulate people’s minds and infuse motivation into them,” says Scholtes.

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