The journey into safety rewards and recognition never needs to be a blind one.  Often times a potential client will come to us not knowing where to start. We know that there are specific costs associated with safety (in particular – accidents) including lost time, claims, administrative expenses, and more.  The best thing to do is to evaluate the company’s current state of affairs relative to safety and that includes costs, incident rates, claims, training, recognition, committees, regular meetings, etc.  The more in tune a company is with their overall safety strategy and culture the more likely they are to create a properly designed and effective safety reward and recognition program.

Utilizing an outside vendor for these types of programs can be helpful, in part, because they can more objectively evaluate existing challenges and make recommendations to assist in creating a successful program.

When initiating a relationship with a client for a safety reward and recognition program we offer our Safety Questionnaire which evaluates:

–        Goals

–        Target Audience

–        Retention Levels

–        Training & Communication

–        Accidents & Incidents

–        Existing & Historical Programs

Many reward and recognition programs can be more challenging to plan for as there aren’t always hard costs to benchmark – safety is not one of them.  Be sure to evaluate and assess before embarking on a safety reward and recognition program.  Your existing hard costs can be invaluable tools in determining your program’s key areas of focus.  By surveying your employees and benchmarking costs and statistics, your company will be better able to launch and maintain a reward and recognition program that continually provides cost savings and a safer workforce.

The National Safety Council has some great tools and resources available at http://www.nsc.org/measure/pages/jse-infographic.aspx.