Safety incentives: Boon or bane?

Any incentive to employee towards safety programme implementation will help only in the beginning. Later on, they demand more and more which becomes a vicious circle and is like opening so called Pandora's box. If you try increase the standards after attaining and maintaining certain level, you will face resistance from the employees. In fact, as the article says, they may hide the issues and do not report, not only for getting the incentive, but that they may be rebuked by colleagues, if the person is involved/reported accident/near miss and deprived others of the incentives.

http://safetydailyadvisor.blr.com/archive/2011/10/17/safety_management_incentives_pros_cons.aspx#comments?Source=SDF&effort=13

Bhopal Accident - One more year passed!

Another year passed to count on Bhopal accident. After the Bhopal accident, we can recount the accidents at HPCL, Vizag and IOCL, Jaipur where human lives are lost in double digit. We do not know, how many are going to happen at any time. We may think that we are doing pretty well on safety matters, but it is the luck and time factor rather than our safety alertness that accidents of great magnitude did not happen.

All of us know what to do to avert an accident, but complacency and wrong priorities make us to delay immediate actions for improving safety at workplace.

In the West, well established industrial organizations saw occurrence of accidents, though there safety record is at its best till the occurrence of the accident.

Though, incentives do not lead to permanent safety solutions, still we can offer significant incentives to employees who point out hazards and those responsible for allowing those hazards should be punished parallelly.

Too much freedom and associated inaction should not be tolerated in any hazard installation and wrong doers should be handled severely.

A study on PPE use (not using) by workers - reasons - recommendations

There is good article on why workers do not use PPE and risk themselves to accidents. The article also elaborates on view of the safety professionals about reasons and recommendations for making the workers to use PPE.

Safety Rewards/Incentives - Boon or Bane?

Many organizations reward and provide incentive to their employees for working safely for certain period without accident or for reporting of near misses, incidents, etc or giving suggestion for enhancing safety at work place.

However, the question is whether such rewards or incentives are helpful on long term basis. As long as genuine reporting system exists and followed, the rewarding system may work. However, it is also likely that accidents may not be reported and hid so that targeted accident-free period can be achieved and rewarded, which will defeat the basic purpose of improving safety at work place.

Sometime back, an expert commented in a safety seminar that rewarding system will not work. The news of various accidents in different countries supports such statements because generally there will not be any accident without warning signals. If action is taken on such signals, then accidents could have been avoided. As nobody cares to report or take action, people and environment are endangered.

It is therefore advisable not to pamper employees with rewards and instead use the resources to communicate the hazards and consequences so that accidents do not occur. Again hazard communication should be specific to the job in which persons are engaged and in this regard, job supervisors play important role.