Recognizing Safety

Tying safety to rewards in any manner is a tricky undertaking.  Fraught with peril, as I like to say.  So I was interested to see some just released data on safety recognition practices, and thought I'd share a few tidbits here.

WorldatWork has just published their newest version of the Trends in Employee Recognition Report (premium members can find it in the survey results page of the web site), which covers the employee recognition practices of over 600 responding organizations.  I'm not going to take time here to highlight and comment on overall recognition trends; my colleague Derek Irvine did a superb job of this in his Compensation Cafe post last Thursday.  Instead, I'd like to hone in on the safety recognition data.

For starters, 22% of participating organizations report having a safety recognition plan in place currently.  Certainly this reflects a minority of respondents compared to more broadly embraced kinds of recognition programs such as "length of service" (90%) or "above and beyond performance" (79%), but consider the fact that more than a third of the participants hail from less safety-intense industries such as finance, insurance, consulting, professional services and the like.  What would be interesting to see - but is not currently detailed in the report - is how popular safety recognition programs are in industries like manufacturing and construction.

The pattern in prevalence of safety recognition programs across the 8 years in which WorldatWork has been conducting this research is interesting, as seen in the table below.  I wonder what we should make of the 33% drop in prevalence from 2005 to 2011?

 
 
Also interesting to note are the differences in safety recognition plan prevalence across different organization sizes; in a pattern somewhat aligned with overall recognition practices, we see that safety plans are almost 3 times more prevalent at bigger organizations (5,000 to 20,000 employees) than at smaller ones (<500 employees).

 

Most of these safety recognition programs have been in place for awhile:

• 3% for < 12 months
• 27% for 1 to 5 years
• 71% for over 5 years

The age of the average program begs the question: are these plans being reviewed and updated regularly to ensure relevancy and impact?  Hope so.

Average percent of employees recognized in the past 12 months through safety recognition: 29%.  Worth noting that this is the highest percent across all types of recognition programs.  The three runners up are "length of service", "peer to peer" and "programs to motivate specific behaviors" - all at 21%.

One of the reasons I find this data interesting and worth sharing is that I believe recognition is a reinforcement particularly well-suited to safety.  More often than not, safety problems are pervasive cultural problems.  Recognition, which celebrates and creates role models of those who exhibit the desired behaviors, can be particularly effective in this arena.  Cash efforts, like specific safety incentive plans or even attempts to incorporate safety into a broad-based employee incentive program, certainly command attention - but they carry an impressive set of risks and challenges along with them.

That's it.  Reactions?

Image courtesy of onlinesafetycourse.info

Comments

[Blair Johanson]

I wonder if the decline in safety recognition plans results from a shift in lower technology to higher technology manufacturing, the use of robotics, the loss of manufacturing positions to foreign countries and moving from a labor to service sector economy. It would be interesting to map the safety recognition plans percentage with the declining GNP for manufacturing business sector. On the other hand, we have numerous trucking firms in our region of the country and they place a significant emphasis on truck driver safety recognition programs.

[Derek Irvine, Globoforce]

Great post, Ann. We're focusing more and more on safety and recognition programs. Too many companies go the easy way and end up incenting the wrong behavior, like rewarding people/groups that have the fewest incidents. This often just encourages non-reporting.

Instead companies should encourage true safety and recognize and reward people when they uncover safety issues, report them, offer solutions proactively or even reactively -- anything that helps keep employees (and/or the public) safe. Isn't that the point of safety programs?

[Ann Bares]

Blair: Good points, it would be interesting to look at this on an industry by industry basis. I'd bet it's a very varied and multi-angled story when you take it down to that level.

Derek: It is the point, isn't it? Good to hear that this is a growing part of what your group is focusing on - recognition does seem to be particularly well-suited to reinforcing safety.

Thanks!

[Jeff Eck]

Safety is huge at my company, being in the mining and construction industries. We now reward both inputs (behavior and safety programs, audits, etc) as well as outputs (incident rates) to balance things, at the same time trying to have a safety culture. So far, so good.