| MARCH
2007 |
Making Safety Incentives work
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In an ideal workplace people would behave safely
all of the time because they want to, not because
they have to. They would always be conscious of
safety and they would never take an unsafe shortcut
or put themselves at risk. As a result, personal
injury on the job would be a rare event.
In reality, people are often motivated to behave
unsafely because at risk – behaviour can
make a job faster, easier or more comfortable
to perform. Before designing or implementing a
safety incentive program, it is important to understand
how an incentive reward process can overcome these
temptations and increase people’s motivation
to behave safely.
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Motivating Safe Behaviour: |
Reducing injuries in the workplace depends
upon changing the natural relationship between
safety behaviours and their consequences. To change
the equation and increase the motivation to behave
safely, extra or extrinsic consequences are added.
There are three ways to do this. |
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Increase the negative
consequences of at risk behaviour |
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Disciplinary Procedures, including termination
of employment, are extra negative consequences.
They are penalties, added to make the negative
consequences of at risk behaviour more powerful
that the natural rewards.
They increase the motivation to behave safely
by making at risk behaviour more costly. |
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Increase the positive consequences
of safe behaviour |
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Rewards for good safety performance are
provided to increase the benefits of safe
behaviour. They create extra, positive consequences
to complete with the natural rewards if at
risk behaviour. The more the reward is valued
the more important it is to people, the more
power it will have to motivate safe behaviour. |
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Incentive and rewards: |
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A safety incentive program is designed to
increase the motivation to behave safely by
promising a positive consequence – a
reward – for behaviour that will improve
safety performance. |
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| The motive is the activator. It directs the desired
behaviour by promising, in advance, that a reward
will be earned if the target behavior occurs. The
reward is the positive consequences. If people
value the reward and believe they are able to
earn it, they will be motivated to perform the
safe behaviour.
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To
follow: Rewards versus Penalties. |
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