How to Improve Workplace Safety Using Employee Recognition

As an employer, your average operational cost per employee safety incident is $7,000¹. How many safety incidents do you budget for each fiscal year?

Aside from the financial advantage of reducing workplace injuries, well-executed safety programs deliver employee engagement benefits such as increases in productivity, employee retention and employee morale.

Create a culture of safety

Your culture is all about behaviours: the acceptable ways to behave in order to succeed in your organisation. If you want a safe and healthy culture, you have to show your employees you believe in it by communicating, measuring, recognising and rewarding the coinciding behaviours.

• Define clear safety goals
• Clarify the behaviours that are aligned to the goals
• Determine metrics, start and end dates
• Set a recognition and reward budget
• Publicise progress and achievement

Finally, senior leaders need to be involved throughout the initiatives and lead by example. In order to change behaviours for the long-term, these stakeholders have to consistently demonstrate their support.

Use your existing program

If you already have an employee recognition program in place, it’s easy to add safety initiatives. Start by identifying the audience that is eligible to participate: specific departments or everyone in the organisation. Different departments may have their own safety metrics, but the entire organisation could have an overarching goal, such as zero accidents or decreased incidents by 5% per month.

Use the recognition program to communicate launch dates, progress and achievements. Include a place for best practices and recognition for innovative ways to be safe; some programs include forums and chats to host Q&A or gather suggestions around safety.

Include goal-setting, badges and rewards to drive repeat behaviours and reinforce positive actions that will help you achieve your safety goals. Finally, it’s helpful to include short quizzes to measure knowledge retention and drive activity with the program.

Implementing a new program

Creating a new program to build a safety culture may initially seem like an expense. Remember – a culture is all about behaviours, and “as many as 96 percent of all workplace accidents are triggered by unsafe behaviour”². In order to achieve your safety goals, you have to change behaviours and sustain them until they become the natural fabric of your organisation.

You may also think that training is the silver bullet to better safety behaviours. While important for people to understand what is safe and how to handle unsafe incidents, you will still need a program to drive long-term adoption of that training. Appreciation and praise cement the behaviours in our memories as positive experiences and motivate us to repeat them.

A recognition program is the best way to put safety at the forefront of everyone’s mind and to ensure that all of your safety initiatives get the attention they deserve.

¹The Cost of Work-related Injury and Illness for Australian Employers, Workers and the Community: 2012–13

²Safety First