Posted By Peter Wilson Is it recommended that safety performance should or should not be subject to financial incentive?

Posted By Ian P Employees being offered financial incntives for a zero accident record have been known to not report accidents in case they lose the bonus or because they are pressured by colleagues not to report it for the same reason. Many of the employees in one company came to rely on the bonus for things like their summer holidays and were naturally reluctant to give it up just because somebody got a few bruises. I remember seeing a text display outside a factory I used to regularly pass which gave the number of days since an accident, terrific if it was just that but not if all it meant was the number of days since an accident was reported.

Posted By Pete48 Peter, As a general rule I would say no. I have never known a safety bonus scheme to truly improve H&S and I have worked in a few including some very big worldwide ones. They might reduce AFR if these are high; they increase short term visibility of H&S because they need publicity and management to function. Do they offer long lasting, self improving changes? Not in my experience. Not only that but they are notoriously difficult to design, manage and keep overtly fair to all. For example if you have one unit that has zero LTA and another that has 50 a year, or a factory that is flat out 24/7 and a unit that works hard but is small and 9 to 5. How do you motivate both with one incentive scheme? They can eat up a lot of time and money for little return. However IMHO, to dismiss reward for good safety may lose a valuable tool for the integration, rather than improvement of H&S. If there are no other bonus schemes in operation, then the mantra that working safely is a condition of employment is sufficient. Your salary or wage contains an element based on the employers’ expectations of safety ability and performance in your job. Fair enough and simple? Well maybe not. Where personal annual appraisals or ratings are used, especially where they determine individual annual increases and may prompt one off payments for those on salary maximums, then H&S should be a relevant part of the appraisal rating. (i.e. some jobs may have greater H&S content or responsibility than others) Where increases are negotiated via union agreements, H&S performance in the company should form part of the criteria under discussion. Where there are regular bonuses or incentive schemes, notably in sales environments or production lines, then having a H&S element to the bonus can help integrate, note not necessarily improve, H&S. Where companies pay annual bonuses based on group performance, then again H&S can be one of the measures. This doesn’t require any extra money, just a different slice of the cake. It clearly places some recognition on the H&S element of the success, whether personal or group or organisation wide and rewards both individual high performance as well as sharing in team or group success.

Posted By andymak How about an incentive scheme for actually reporting accidents rather than trying to reduce them directly using a financial incentive? Not quite as crazy as it sounds..... But it needs the double edge sword effect of also rewarding the department with the least number of accidents. So if someone witnesses an accident or near miss and reports it their department gets a credit which at the end of the year is translated into a cash bonus for the departments staff. This could lead to an influx of previously unreported incidents and allow for better trend anlysis. However if this was then coupled with a bonus scheme for the department with the least number of accidents and incidents affecting their people. That could prevent people 'staging incidents' to get the bonus. Just an abstract thought on what has been a strange afternoon ;-)