It is both intuitive and backed by studies that when employees are engaged with their work and safety practices, injury rates drop, and the company’s safety performance improves (Mullins et al., 2019). Developing effective new methods for increasing employee engagement and rewarding good safety practices can certainly be a challenge. However, by challenging our current practices with innovative approaches, we can create more dynamic and engaging environments for our teams. It is commonly agreed that a lack of employee engagement is one of the largest pain-points that safety professionals face with disengaged workers having 64% more accidents than those that claim to be engaged with their jobs (Harter, 2020). Therefore, we need to begin by asking ourselves what is wrong with the current approach.
One of the primary reasons workers are unengaged is their lack of autonomy (Lartey, 2021). Going beyond their pay, benefits, and opportunities for growth, employees need to feel like their work is meaningful. This includes feeling like their opinions on safety measures are heard. The traditional top-down approach to EHS management of auditing safety standards and informing workers of poor compliance often results in employees perceiving safety policies as obstacles rather than tools to help them perform their jobs more effectively. The solution is to maximize employees’ involvement in safety-related decision making. Not only will it improve their engagement, but it will also leverage their expertise. Workers are the most knowledgeable about the risks they face on a daily basis and are likely to have innovative ideas on how to mitigate them. Moreover, they will be far more open to following policies that they played a part in creating.
This line of thinking follows through into the ideal methods of rewarding good safety practices. Many of the commonly used forms of rewarding workers incentivize avoiding workplace incidents or close calls, however this often results in incidents not being reported, especially if a reward threshold is close to being achieved. The idea behind any plan to reward safety practices needs to be to reinforce a stronger safety culture within your organization, therefore any rewards offered will need to make employees want to engage more in their safety. Offering things such as gift cards, days off work, awards, and public recognition are all great ideas but they need to be directed at the correct actions such as when an employee shows active engagement in safety training and makes their own suggestions for improvements. A more modern idea of rewarding safety is ‘gamifying’ your form of measuring employee engagement. Earning points for milestones employees reach before earning rewards gives you an easy way to track engagement levels while fostering a strong safety culture within your company.
