This is Part 4 of my discussion on the effectiveness of incentives. Let's finish the series with a look at the role of compliance and control in incentive programs.

Compliance & Control

In Brave New Workplace, Robert Howard makes a powerful point:

"When managerial control becomes personalized, the relationship of workers to the corporation is understood in exclusively psychological terms. The very idea of power and control becomes purely therapeutic, a matter of feeling rather than action. And the genuine conflicts of working life - and, indeed, of all social life - themselves become personalized, dismissed as matters of mere individual preference or, worse, social deviance, rather than recognized as legitimate subjects of social and political choice."[i]

While rhetoric of empowerment and team approaches to safety are all the rage, the true picture of what is being promoted may not be as simple as the jargon. In The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of Management Gurus, John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge note, "For all the talk about empowerment, most are scared, anxious creatures."[ii]

Micklethwait and Woolridge go on to say:

"Nowadays, even the most humdrum jobs can be 'incentivized.' Roughly six out of 10 American companies have a system for rewarding their employees for performance. . . . Moreover, incentive pay remains a blunt tool, particularly lower in the organization. In many cases, incentive pay tends to increase paranoia rather than soothe it. If a group of people do extremely well and are rewarded 96% of their possible bonus, the likely response of the recipients will be that somebody has stolen 4% of what they deserved." [iii]

Dr. Robert Sass of the University of Saskatchewan notes:

"The management professions in North America and elsewhere have inherited - whether an individual manager is aware of it or not - the ideology of Fredrick Taylor's scientific management. This ideology is actually the science of the management of control of the work of others. One of its cardinal tenets is that management dictates to the worker the precise nature in which work is to be performed. In North America, this is exactly what safety is all about!"

It's been said that all safety, in the final analysis, depends on motivation, and that workers need to be motivated to work, and motivated to work safely.[iv] Dr. Sass notes that his research on safety incentives indicates the prevalence of a blame-the-victim approach, and studies have refuted the assertion that safety is not merely a matter of motivation.[v]

Conclusion

Safety incentives are a complex subject. Although they have their fair share of critics, as we have seen, there is much evidence to support the conclusion that safety incentive programs can improve safety performance. Such programs are based on sound principles and understandings of human behavior. However, as is often the case, the challenge is to apply the principles to actual workplaces and industrial environments. Although much more research remains to be done, I hope that this series and its look at the literature has provided an overview of the lessons learned so far.

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FOOTNOTES

[i] Robert Howard, Brave New Workplace: America's Corporate Utopias: How They Create Inequalities and Social Conflict in Our Working Lives (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 120.

[ii] John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1996), 206.

[iii] Ibid, 209.

[iv] Sass, 13.

[v] Green, 9.

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TELL US ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCES WITH SAFETY INCENTIVES

Do any of you SafetyXChange members offer incentives to workers for working safely? Please tell us about your program and whether it's proven successful. glennd@bongarde.com. We'll print the responses in next Wednesday's issue.

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SAFETY INCENTIVES & THE LAW

How does offering safety incentives affect a company's legal compliance? We'll provide an answer in next Monday's issue of SafetyXChange. Stay tuned.

Glenn Demby
Editor-in-Chief
SafetyXChange

BY THE NUMBERS
Rich Canadians

By Glenn Demby

Statistics Canada, the national agency that compiles data about Canada's economy and society, just released a study on the country's highest-income tax filers:

89,000 The minimum income an individual must have made to have been in the top 5% of income earners

154,000 The minimum income a family must have made to have been in the top 5% of income earners

25 The percentage of the country's total income earned by the top 5%

36 The percentage of the country's total income taxes paid by the top 5%

27 The effective percentage tax rate of the top 5%

Other findings:

Source: Statistics Canada, figures are from 2004, http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/75F0002MIE/75F0002MIE2007006.htm

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