Safety in the workplace is a must, and leaders are always looking for ways to create work environments that meet or exceed recommended safety standards. One popular strategy is to implement safety incentive programs, which usually have the goal of raising awareness of safety procedures and motivating employees to adhere to them. But many safety managers are now wondering if these programs are truly successful—or if they do more harm than good. When deciding whether to implement a safety incentive program, organizations should consider its risks. 

Important company priorities include efficiency, speed, revenue, and profit. The connections among those four are obvious: without speed and efficiency, an organization won’t make revenue and profit. But what role should safety play in a company’s purchasing decisions?

Safety is the only department where, when performance drops, it's common practice to bring in an outside speaker to sling platitudes for an hour in hopes that performance will improve afterward. When production lags or when revenues fall or when hiring slows down, companies don’t pay consultants to talk about those issues with front-line staff for an hour. But safety does. 

More often than not, a facility’s safety is not the first thing that comes to mind when considering what an organization must have in order to achieve and maintain consistent production. Digging a little deeper, however, reveals that safety actually emerges from the same conditions that make for efficient production. Five practices in particular can have a huge impact on safety. 

There's a fundamental shift that occurs the moment a front-facing employee becomes their crew's supervisor—and the quicker the new manager understands that shift, the quicker they will get the buy-in of their team. Odds are good that new supervisor was previously the rock star employee of the team. Likely they were a top performer with some pretty decent experience and even better results. Their employer saw this talent and, wanting other employees to be more like the rock star, promoted that individual to supervisor so they could help the others.