Looking for some advice on establishing a safety reward scheme please.

The scheme will be focused on positives behaviours (not 'longest amount of time without an accident' etc. I don't want to drive accident reporting underground).

I would like to know what kinds of reward schemes people have implemented; how did you score it? What sort of prizes were awarded? What were the challenges in terms of implementation and then maintaining the scheme?

Thanks in advance.

We give out monthly £50 M&S vouchers, usually for spotting things such as inapproiate materials in a skip, a person who went above and beyond in their course of duty etc.

Have a monthly all hands butty meeting reviewing close call cards/near misses & corporate comms and finish up with the award to say a public well done to the pesron involved, obviously free breakfast rolls and juices for every one else.

Works very well for us as absolutely eveyone is included.

Originally Posted by: ttxela

The cynic in me wonders how many people would be tempted to surreptitiously chuck an old paint tin in the cardboard skip then report it to claim their £50......

I was thinking the same. 

Originally Posted by: jmaclaughlin

>The cynic in me wonders how many people would be tempted to surreptitiously chuck an old paint tin in the cardboard skip then report it to claim their £50......

In which case the cynic in you, would of course pick up a close call card.  :-)

Wow you must have some effective system for continuously monitoring your staff if it can spot someone putting a paint tin in a skip. Is it based on cameras, something that they wear or something directly attached to the cerebellum which can detect impure thoughts:” Put tin in skip and collect £50 voucher “. If so, can you give details of where you got it from so that I can use to monitor some of my staff?

So the rail sector monitors all staff at all times!  Does this include the people that came up with last year’s new timetables? Personally I’d love to see how they came up with those!

It was a joke, actually

The original question was about a scheme that promises financial incentives to staff for ‘positives behaviours’. I commented that it is difficult to establish what these behaviours are and that they should be beyond the simple compliance with local Health and Safety rules (eg people should not be rewarded for simply reporting accidents). You mentioned your scheme which rewards people for things like ‘We give out monthly £50 M&S vouchers, usually for spotting things such as inappropriate materials in a skip…’ and the more cynical members of the forum suggested that people might decide to put something into  a skip just to claim the reward. Your response, implied that if they tried that they would be caught out (although if it was so easy to catch someone putting a tin of paint in a skip, why would you need someone to report it). The implication is that you have some monitoring system that keeps track of all worker activity. If such a system existed that we could essentially all give up as the great issue with Health and Safety is not rules or risk assessment or safe systems of work but that it relies on people to actually doing the right thing without cutting corners and putting themselves and others at risk.       You achieve this by having the right culture and esseretally one that is self-policing, what people like Tim Marsh call mindful safety supported by transformational leadership and employee engagement.  This is not easy and I am not convinced that giving rewards to some people for some positive Health and Safety behaviours is the way forward.

We need every  H&S incentive we can think of, given that last year we were grappling with 6,661 injuries, of which 164 were major & two workforce fatalities, in addition to 300 odd suicides.

For us complacency is a major issue, especially for heavily experienced workers who were operating on auto pilot ignoring their surroundings which usually means working adjacent to moving trains, so anything that engages the workforce in H&S/Safety briefs  is a major benefit to us and we have had some very good close call cards which have led to shared learning/change in established work procedures etc.

 A lot of our workforce are very competitive so are actively looking out for things they can report, so the reward/recognition scheme works very well for us, obviously in different scenarios such as a office this might not work so well.

Last years stats…. :-(

https://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/39103/rail-safety-statistics-2017-18.pdf

Suspect this may be a training video?, the braking/stopping distance of a train is between 300m and 2km depending on speed/size, usually by the time the driver sees someone on the line it's too late to do anything other than sound the klaxon and hit the emergency brakes, but by then it's usually way too late.

Also the only entinty that can contact a train driver directly in the UK is a signaller not a policeman, imagine its not a lot different in the USA.