Safety awards !

Safety awards exist in almost every workplace. Someone once came up with the idea that awards for safety would help build safety culture and keep workers wanting to work safely. But like safety meetings themselves, awards events come off as hastily-assembled and minimally organized.

Celebrating “years of safe service” somehow became an awards program. These “years of safe service” awards have become the lone bright spot in an otherwise not-terribly-engaging safety program.

Safety awards, for the sake of having something to celebrate, should not focus on years or milestones of safe service. Any awards program based on a single criteria of celebrating five, ten, twenty or thirty years of safety, must stop. If this is how you do yours, 

Here are five reasons you should stop your Annual Safety Awards program:

You make safety seem unnatural. Safe and secure is our natural state. Avoiding harm is one of the things that humans do best. So when you celebrate another milestone of safety, you give the impression that safety is not the natural state of things. You give the impression that the work you’re doing is supposed to injure people and that the award winners are exceptions to the rule. Aren’t your people supposed to be safe? Is it written in your employment agreement that your people are likely to get hurt? No, it’s not. They’re supposed to be safe. That’s what you hire them to do: work well and safely. Don’t make safety unnatural.

You will have to reward the safety cowboys too. By celebrating years of safety, you have to reward the safety cowboys for being lucky. Every workplace has the guys who don't drink the safety Kool-aid. They are proud of having worked for twenty-five years without injury. They don't need a safety program to tell them what to do. But there are behaviors in every workplace that need improvement. Years of safe service doesn't address behaviors. So, now you're forced to reward the employees with poor safety behaviors and those who don’t buy-in to safety. It undermines your safety program.

It’s a team effort. People don’t stay safe by themselves. Years of safety is the result of 3 things: safety awareness, teamwork, and personal choices. When you recognize one person only, you diminish the efforts of the whole team. Team sports are not won by one or two individuals. Every win is a team effort. Every loss is a team effort. The team effort is what needs celebration. Get your teams to award their members with a “hardest-working” award. That award is the result of effort - not a calendar.

It’s the least you can do. No, seriously. It is the VERY least you can do. Counting days on a calendar is the easiest thing there is. There is no criteria other than to end the day without incident - or to let an incident go unreported. There are no behaviors to commend and no improvements to make to get an award. The bar never gets raised. If you can make it one year without an incident, you get an award. Five, ten or twenty years, you get one there too. Unfortunately, this practice rewards the result, not the behaviors that get the results. By this logic, there is no need to improve safety procedures. Meanwhile, you have created another incentives program that rewards numbers, not behaviors.

It disinterests everyone except the award winner. And even him, you can’t be sure of. Can't you hear the smattering of polite golf applause for each worker named to accept their award. But as the long list of names get called, the applause dies down to a mere three-clap per award winner. The motivation for congratulating their co-workers dwindles. The awards ceremony becomes a watch-gazing activity. By the time they call the last few names, even those award winners are ready for the event to be over.

The sales department doesn't give awards for making sales every year. They give them for achieving the most sales - focused on behavior. The HR department doesn't hand out awards for hiring more people every year. That's what they're supposed to do. The accounting department doesn't get awards for avoiding math mistakes. But safety gives awards for working safely, even though it's a requirement of the job.

Recognition should be a daily activity, especially at safety meetings. The recognition should focus on safety behaviors and good decisions. Milestone awards don't tell the whole story and ignore the whole team except for one individual. Recognizing employees within a day or two of their outstanding performance raises the bar in the moment. It allows you to build and develop and improve. That's how safety gets better: one compliment at a time.