It is both intuitive and backed by studies that when employees are engaged with their work
and safety practices, injury rates drop, and the company’s safety performance improves
(Mullins et al., 2019). Developing effective new methods for increasing employee
engagement and rewarding good safety practices can certainly be a challenge. However, by
challenging our current practices with innovative approaches, we can create more dynamic
and engaging environments for our teams. It is commonly agreed that a lack of employee
engagement is one of the largest pain-points that safety professionals face with disengaged
workers having 64% more accidents than those that claim to be engaged with their jobs
(Harter, 2020). Therefore, we need to begin by asking ourselves what is wrong with the
current approach.

One of the primary reasons workers are unengaged is their lack of autonomy (Lartey, 2021).
Going beyond their pay, benefits, and opportunities for growth, employees need to feel like
their work is meaningful. This includes feeling like their opinions on safety measures are
heard. The traditional top-down approach to EHS management of auditing safety standards
and informing workers of poor compliance often results in employees perceiving safety
policies as obstacles rather than tools to help them perform their jobs more effectively. The
solution is to maximize employees’ involvement in safety-related decision making. Not only
will it improve their engagement, but it will also leverage their expertise. Workers are the
most knowledgeable about the risks they face on a daily basis and are likely to have
innovative ideas on how to mitigate them. Moreover, they will be far more open to following
policies that they played a part in creating.

This line of thinking follows through into the ideal methods of rewarding good safety
practices. Many of the commonly used forms of rewarding workers incentivize avoiding
workplace incidents or close calls, however this often results in incidents not being
reported, especially if a reward threshold is close to being achieved. The idea behind any
plan to reward safety practices needs to be to reinforce a stronger safety culture within
your organization, therefore any rewards offered will need to make employees want to
engage more in their safety. Offering things such as gift cards, days off work, awards, and
public recognition are all great ideas but they need to be directed at the correct actions
such as when an employee shows active engagement in safety training and makes their
own suggestions for improvements. A more modern idea of rewarding safety is ‘gamifying’ your form of measuring employee engagement. Earning points for milestones employees
reach before earning rewards gives you an easy way to track engagement levels while
fostering a strong safety culture within your company.