For more than 20 years, there has been no more hotly-debated issue in safety than safety incentive programs. Are incentives, recognition and award programs good? Bad? Harmful? Flawed? Or just bad practice? It seems like just about everybody in the industry has an opinion and a real-life "war story" to back it up. The purpose of this series is to cast some light on incentives and their rightful place in workplace safety.

Why Are Incentives Such a Hot Button?

In my opinion, the debate over safety incentives is the consequence of the fact that in the beginning, neither management nor safety practitioners knew how to construct an effective and comprehensive safety and health program for workers. Incentives followed a well-established management paradigm: If you can't manage a problem, throw money at it. Consequently, incentive programs have long raised questions about focus, logic, rationale and emphasis.

Another reason that the incentive issue is such a flash point is because it focuses on people and their behaviors, attitudes and actions. Incentives are an attempt to recognize and reward people for safety and motivate workers to work safely. Many in labor believe that dangling awards, trinkets or other "carrots" to motivate workers is nothing more than an intrusion of management on workers' behaviors and an attempt to bend the worker to management's will and make the workforce malleable and obedient.

A theoretical protest about incentives is based on the premise that workers' actions and omissions don't cause accidents. So programs - and, incidentally, laws and regulations that follow the same basic approach - that incentivize workers' behaviors aren't an effective way to prevent accidents.

Good Idea, Bad Execution

For all of the criticism, the use of incentives is and has remained in long-term and widely-established use for many years. And for good reason. The principles are sound. If incentives didn't work to change behavior, why are sales commissions still used to promote sales?

And it's not just argument by analogy. There is poignant and undeniable evidence of the long-term effectiveness of incentives applied in the arena of safety.Many studies have produced anecdotal and empirical evidence suggesting that the use of safety incentives does indeed result in reduced accident and injury frequency and severity. There have also been many studies and popular articles published which support the notion.

Clearly, getting rid of incentives makes no sense. The problems of safety incentives do not lie with the basic concept. I submit that they're the product of execution - more precisely, flaws in the design and implementation of individual incentive programs.

Conclusion

To sum up: The concept of using incentives to make people work more safely is theoretically sound. The trick is figuring out how to create actual programs that are fair and effective. The rest of this series will be dedicated to answering that question. Next week, in Part 2, I'll look at empirical evidence and suggest which parts of incentive programs work and why.

THIS DATE IN HISTORY
September 5, 1956

By Glenn Demby

The Santa Fe Chief was one of those passenger trains that had a name. It was a Pullman train that began making runs between Chicago and Los Angeles in 1926 and became known as a "rolling boudoir" because of all the famous film stars it carried.

The darkest day in the history of the Chief occurred 51 years ago on this date. It started when a fireman threw a switch right in front of the train as it was speeding into Robinson, New Mexico. The train plunged, brakes screaming, head-on into a parked mail train. The collision killed 20, including the crews of both engines and several of the Chief's passengers. 35 more people were injured.

Safety improvements were made after the accident. For economic reasons, the Chief cut its fares and soon took on fewer stars and more "regular people" as passengers. But competition from air travel forced its permanent shut down. The train made its final run in 1968.

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