Introduction
Information from the National Accident Statistics and Cost reveals that over 10,000 United States employees sustain injuries on the job every day and about 15 of them succumbing to their injuries. The average cost related to these injuries was approximately $45 billion in 2010 and a further $40 billion every year in direct wage substitution and health expenses. Job injuries also have indirect yearly expenditures of $70-$150 billion.
Over 3 million United States employees had job-related accidents in 2010 (National Safety Council, 2001). These worrying statistics have made businesses and government agencies to focus more on safety issues in order to avoid legal penalties, boost employee morale, enhance productivity, and reduce labor turnover. It was through this initiative that safety incentive programs were adopted by many organizations to reward safe work practices.
The main objectives of the safety awards programs were to increase safety awareness among employees, minimize recordable accidents, and promote safe work practices among workers.
However, the functionality and reliability of safety incentives programs to promote safe work practices have proven tricky for many organizations in the United States leading to the establishment of various safety administration institutions such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which regulates safety programs for companies (Geller, 2005). This paper discusses the merits and demerits of injury-based, behavior-based, and process-based programs as three independent safety awards programs.
Injury-based programs
These safety programs are based on the rates of injuries and accidents as a measure of rewarding employees and teams. Workers and groups are awarded for avoiding or minimizing industrial mishaps during specified periods.
Illness oriented safety programs operate on the suppositions that facilities and equipments are secure and do not induce mistakes, workers have appropriate education and understanding on how to handle machinery, and industrial accidents are chiefly the fault of employees’ carelessness or negligence of safety. Injury-based safety programs have the advantages of giving awards like bonuses and prices due to the lack or a minimal number of job-related injuries (Leape & Berwick, 2005).
In addition, this program has the benefit of creating a safer work environment since workers are always under pressure to work safely or lose some benefits. Safe work environments reduce accidents and enhance safety vigilance among employees. However, this approach directly compares rewards with the rates of injuries. This is a condition that poses the temptation for employees not to disclose some injuries for fear of losing personal rewards or denying their teams an incentive. This has the effect of distorting the injury frequency.
The consequences of not reporting an accident or an injury may be insignificant or huge to the employee involved. Lack of reporting injuries falsely reduces the company’s tragedy incidence rate and makes it able to show to the safety management agencies and its head office that their safety operations have advanced; the actual accident figures are concealed (National Safety Council, 2001). This often makes it difficult for regulatory agencies such as OSHA to convince companies to start up legitimate safety programs.
This fact was ascertained after 18 workers died, and 200 others sustained injuries during an explosion at a BP plant in Texas City in 2005 (Leape & Berwick, 2005). An inquiry conducted after the explosion revealed that factory employees dreaded reprisals for exposing potentially precarious situations since the company had a safety incentive plan that attached employees’ incentives to reduced eventualities of accidents and injuries.
The incident prompted members of Congress to invite the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to examine safety programs (McSween, 2008). The GAO published a report that revealed that safety awards programs can be hindrances for employees to disclose accidents and injuries to their managers.
Another demerit of this program is that these plans may become unimportant and difficult to maintain in the long run since employees can consider rewards as a right thus discontinuance may bring far-reaching impacts. Rate-based reward programs may also give false submissions and lead to mistrust between employees and administration.
For instance, imagine a team that makes considerable efforts to avoid mistakes and accidents, yet regrettably encounters an accident and consequently the team misses a reward. Meanwhile, another team that does not attempt to avoid accidents accomplishes their task without injuries and thus receives a reward.
This approach fails to recognize the fact that many incidents are not due to the negligence of employees themselves but are the consequences of aspects outside their control.
A rate-based incentive plan shifts the blame of industrial accidents away from the accountability of the employer to give safety instruction to new workers and places it onto the hands of the employees who are compelled to acknowledge the blame for their individual injuries. The rate-based program does not impart new knowledge to employees that can enable them perform safely but rather forcefully enforces safe behaviors of employees (McSween, 2008).
Behavior-based safety award program
It is based on an employee’s performance as a standard of granting bonuses. The employee behaviors to be rewarded include taking part in safety meetings and teaching, providing ideas on ways of improving job environment safety, and other actions that can assist avoid industrial accidents. Workers can also be rewarded when they invent a safer way to do a job, adhere to safety rules and encourage others to do the same, complete safety training programs, assist investigate accidents, and report dangerous situations.
Behavior-based safety plans are prevalent in job places all over the United States. These incentive plans have improved as an administration tool that takes resources away from a scientific-based health and safety program and focuses interest away from recognizing and tackling workplace perils that induce and lead to job-related accidents and fatalities (National Safety Council, 2001).
Behavior-oriented plans aid in reducing accidents by eliminating a direct connection between an incentive and the extent of accidents reported. Underreporting accidents can lead to the furtherance of dangerous conditions and hazardous actions in the place of work. By choosing to reward and reinforce safe behaviors with a behavior-oriented approach, companies can be certain that their safety incentive programs are satisfying their planned function of a safe job environment for all.
Behavior-oriented safety plans also provide information about facilities and machinery that can injure workers. Timely reporting of accidents, injuries, and unsecure conditions is essential not only in order for the injured workers to access immediate treatment and the employees’ reparation benefits to which they are permitted, but also that managers may redress hazardous working conditions.
Even though behavior oriented plans assist in eradicating the problem of flawed reporting and boost turnout in conferences and training, their usefulness is questionable. These programs are relatively hard to determine and check since workers’ behaviors are obviously more compound and difficult to judge.
Additionally, workers’ behaviors shift regularly in response to exterior factors like new machinery, and new work teams. These plans strengthen safe performance by providing rewards to workers or crews who display safe performances; the program is not attached to accident rates. Since the objective is safe performance and not a reduced accident rate, workers are motivated to be lively partakers in the safety plans (McSween, 2008).
Process based reward programs
Process based reward programs credit individuals for performing definite safety related actions such as maintaining safe driving speed limits, keeping a safe distance while on the road, or putting on safety belts. This program emphasizes actions that a worker should carry out. Process-based programs have the advantage of increasing targeted safety-related actions and consequently increasing non-targeted work behaviors (Goodrum & Gangwar, 2004).
This experience is referred to as response generalization and has assisted safety experts to target a few specific workers’ actions with advantages across many more non-target acts thus is less burdensome to apply. However, these programs injure safety performance intentions and evoke a high bottom-line expenditure on companies. Workers who view these rewards as their lawful entitlements often ridicule these programs.
Additionally, process plans sometimes remunerate erroneous behaviors and the wrong workers. Process-grounded plans conceal reporting of accidents and injuries with the use of incentives that promote trust on extrinsic (money or other financial items) instead of intrinsic support (an interior satisfaction with a person’s work). Furthermore, process plans encourage the use of comparatively small rewards, which tempts workers to modify their actions and manners.
When rewards are kept moderately small, workers excuse their behavior change to interior causes instead of exterior causes. For instance, $1 per mile safety bonus would lead to a collision-free, 50,000 miles per year driver receiving $50,000 yearly or $12,500 quarterly (Goodrum & Gangwar, 2004). This amount is substantial and significant, but not so high to warrant the gross unfairness that might be formed by errors in the system.
However, the process incentive plans have been attributed to increasing safety belt use across different backgrounds especially on manners related to over-speeding and extreme breaking. In all the three safety reward programs, motivation is a vital aspect. Positive support, response, recognition, and reward are considered the four primary constituents for motivation in any safety reward program.
To present constructive reinforcement, motivators should be rewarded in different forms. It is obvious from this paper that organizations which desire to lessen their experience alteration rates, lost time workday occurrences, and limited workday occurrences can use safety reward programs effectively.
Conclusion
This paper has established that other different aspects such as behavior-based programs, rate-based programs, and awards do not alter the efficiency of safety incentive programs in a considerable way. The paper has also revealed how vulnerabilities involved in accidents and injuries that go unreported are unrecognized and uncorrected, which restricts the ability of workers and managers to deal with the safety aspects present in their job places entirely.
Training of employees, unions, and administrators about the discipline of accidents and injury avoidance, danger management, and the use of devices like surveys and investigations can help to eliminate safety threats. Additionally, formulation of government policies that would disallow employer strategies, programs, and performances that discourage workers from reporting accidents and injuries will be an essential milestone towards developing effective safety rewards programs.
In order to achieve a more efficient and comprehensive safety incentive plan, all the stakeholders must encourage the development of materials, courses of study, and methods of teaching intended to advance job place attempts to identify and address risky conditions by establishing broad workplace injury and accident prevention plans proposed to discover and fix risks (Geller, 2005).
References
Geller, E. S. (2005). Behavior-based safety and occupational risk management. Behavior modification, 29(3), 539-561.
Goodrum, P. M., & Gangwar, M. (2004). Safety incentives programs. A study of their effectiveness in construction Prof Safety, 49(7), 24-34.
Leape, L. L., & Berwick, D. M. (2005). Five years after to err is human. JAMA: the journal of the American Medical Association, 293(19), 2384-2390.
McSween, T. E. (2008). Values-Based Safety Process: Improving Your Safety Culture with Behavior-Based Safety. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
National Safety Council (2001). Accident Prevention Manual for Business and Industry: Administration and Programs (13th ed.). Itasca, Illinois: National Safety Council.