Implementing Behavior-Based Safety Using Tangible Rewards

Behavior-based safety (BBS) is becoming the worldwide initiative-of-choice for moving a safety management system to its ultimate level of effectiveness. BBS has been implemented in the United States for about 20 years with overwhelmingly positive results and corroborating data.

Academic studies have been extant since the mid 90s – all showing comparable results – irrespective of the industry or country where BBS has been implemented. Management-driven safety has evolved into employee-driven safety, just like management-driven quality has evolved into employee-driven quality. BBS applications that fail have similar characteristics:

· Leadership is not engaged (which means values, systems and processes have not changed)

· The Steering Committee is not functioning properly

· The data is not being used effectively

· Employees are not engaged

A great many home-grown efforts have problems; it seems like a good idea. Hey! This ain’t rocket science; we can do this ourselves and save lots of money. It sounds good up until the point where someone has to tell senior leadership that they are not doing their job. Or, when internal personalities and politics prohibit objective analysis; changes aren’t made and you cannot say the wrong thing or you may get a poor performance evaluation.

When you tell companies they need an objective, third-party change agent (consultant), they think you are making a self-serving statement. Many companies have had bad experiences with consultants and they think they are all suspect. Helpful hint: Use consulting companies where the consultants have advanced degrees; the more Ph.D.s the better. Why? Because Ph.D. Behavioral Psychologists have a commitment to achieving success irrespective of the money involved.

I know a lot of Ph.D. behavioral psychologists, and they are universally committed to achieving change in an ethical manner. They are not driven to just sell products and make money. Behavior change is their life – their career – their personal commitment. Their personal identity is defined by the quality of their work.

If you have a great BBS process, but your employees are not engaged, it may be because the consequences for participating or not participating are not significant. BBS distinguishes itself from pseudo-BBS processes (like the old STOP process) by being focused on identifying and acknowledging safe behavior as well as concerns. Positive feedback, rewards, recognition, and group celebrations differentiate BBS from other approaches.

In the United States, hierarchical organizational structures have been all but abandoned in favor of flatter – more participative structures that encourage employee participation in decision-making processes. An accompanying phenomenon has been an equivalent social sensitivity – an increased emphasis on employee respect, job satisfaction, and management-employee relations.

Progressive companies (those that seek to elicit high levels of discretionary effort from their workforce) develop managers and supervisors who know how to provide positive feedback and recognize employee value-added behaviors. They embrace the concept of “Total Rewards,” which attempts to align all organizational systems and processes in a manner that encourages employee loyalty, commitment, and performance contribution.

Internationally, there are broad variances in organizational practices and social systems. Many companies have not trained their supervisors and managers in advanced interpersonal skills and the relationship between employee and supervisor is authoritatively defined. Therefore employees may not be positively encouraged to perform, but perform in order to avoid the displeasure of their immediate supervisors. The difference in performance and job satisfaction between the two approaches is well researched and documented. Well trained supervisors who know how to use positive feedback and recognition attain 30%+ better employee performance when compared to authoritarian models of supervision.

There are many organizational settings in which tangible incentives are practical and can compensate for problems with supervisory training, organizational structure, or other broad cultural issues. In other words, if you cannot engage your employees with a Total Rewards or positive reinforcement-based organizational philosophy, then you can elicit employee performance and behavior change using well designed incentive systems.

Incentives have always worked well in jobs and industries where employees willingly compete against explicit performance measures and objectives. Most sales-related jobs have at least monthly measures of performance and sales people are willingly to pit themselves against each other and a sales goal. They love the awards, plaques, Ipods, and vacation trips they are awarded as a result of reaching performance objectives.

Incentives have less consistent success when applied to manufacturing settings, and their effectiveness is related to the sensitivity with which the rewards and recognition process is designed and applied. The systematic delivery of awards, tangible items, and so forth is effective when paired with management attention and organizational appreciation.

Incentives can be effective when:

• You need to create behavior change quickly
• When organizational culture change is impractical – where the government runs the business or the organization is engaged in broader problems (like the automotive industry in the US now)
• Where leadership engagement is difficult to obtain
• Where supervisor and managers are not well trained in “people skills”
• Where management has very little leverage over performance behavior – as in highly unionized organizations
• Where the education level of employees is very low or language barriers disrupt supervisor/employee communications
• Where money is the primary motivator for job satisfaction
• The organization cannot drive symbolic rewards and recognition practices successfully

The use of tangible rewards in conjunction with BBS processes is common in the US. Symbolic rewards – caps, coffee cups, gift certificates, and dinner celebrations employees are quite common. If an employee in the US feels rewarded by a gift certificate and a plaque, but is conflicted by larger rewards like Ipods and vacation trips, then the organization should govern its behavior accordingly.

On the other hand, many work environments require the systematic delivery of tangible rewards to fully engage employees and to encourage behavior change. If the system is customized to the organization and to the specific behaviors required for performance success, then incentives will add value. If you read previous blogs in this sequence, you will identify a trend in the advice I provide for interjecting change into organizations: Participation, collaboration and customization are necessary to ensure that the system fits the organization and to ensure that employees accept the system.

If your BBS system is not performing satisfactorily, then you might consider increasing employee engagement and behavior change through the skillful and sensitive application of a well-designed tangible reward system. Make sure that the tangible rewards are applied to up-stream performance indicators and to safe behaviors – not to downstream results.

Also, consider using incentives to encourage management and supervisory behavior change. If you survey your employees about what kind of verbal behavior they want to see from their supervisors, you will come up with a list that approximates the multitude of surveys conducted in the US and Europe asking the same question.