Page 66 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2017

Employee Gifts & Incentives
recognition/rewards programs that am- plify and enable their safety message to get through. They also know that prop- erly built programs do not offer cash as the award, because cash gets confused with compensation, but instead offer a wide variety of tangible merchandise and travel awards to truly capture and hold the attention of workers.
Share and Protect Your Success
But what comes next? Now, you, as a safe- ty manager, have successfully overseen the creation of a great program that is ad- dressing your needs by using engagement tactics and targeting the behaviors that help prevent accidents. The program is working, other executives and managers in the company have noticed, and they come calling because they want a piece of what you have . . . an engaged workforce.
The overtures may come from other department heads interested in improv- ing training, lowering turnover, creating a wellness program, increasing customer retention, or any number of other ini- tiatives. They will all want to know how you are moving your needle, how their department may benefit from your expe- rience, and how they can latch on to the success of your program. The attention may also come from senior executives and “bean counters” who see the positive fiscal impact of what you are doing and who direct other department heads to mirror your efforts and results.
So how should you react to others who want to share in your success? My first word of advice is, of course, “gra- ciously,” in that you all play for the same team and shared company success is a ris- ing tide that will truly lift all boats. You should look, however, for mutually ben- eficial ways to connect your initiatives with others while being very careful not to dilute your “safety brand.” Make no mistake about it, by the time you have successfully improved safety by deploy- ing employee engagement tactics, you will have created a “brand” that now has value and that should be shared only in mutually beneficial ways. It will be easiest to accomplish this if you start by connect-
ing with other initiatives that compliment your objectives and goals.
This is the first step in expanding from a one-dimensional program into a “Total Rewards” offering.
Infuse New Energy with Wellness
For safety, there can be no better example of a program that has complimentary objectives than wellness. Safety and well- ness are flip sides of the same coin with many objectives that directly overlap. In fact, the next step for many of my cus- tomers with long-term successful safety programs that are looking for innovative ways to infuse energy into the program is to add a wellness component (even if HR didn’t come and ask for it). A few simple examples of how safety directly connects to wellness:
■ Smokers tend to miss more days of work because they are sick more often, putting pressure on others to cover their shifts (drive their vehicle, run their routes), and the people covering their shifts are more likely to have an accident because they lack familiarity with the position.
■ Overweight and obese drivers and heavy equipment operators are more likely to have sleep apnea and less likely to get a good night’s sleep, causing them to work while tired and leading inexorably to more accidents.
■ Workers with high blood pressure or hypertension who are not aware of their afflictions and who do not properly mitigate their medical conditions are more susceptible to mood swings that can invite dangerous situations into the workplace.
For a safety department, there can be a real potential benefit to partnering up with HR or some other department to extend the benefits of the safety recog- nition/rewards program it has created to also address and improve wellness. The trick is to do so without distracting or damaging the success enjoyed on the safety side. In other words, to make the additional wellness component synergis- tic while maintaining the core messaging that made the safety program successful to begin with.
It is easy to see how wellness can be
joined to safety to the benefit of both initiatives, and of course the opposite would also be true. If your company has a successful wellness program and safety is lagging behind, see whether you can link safety to wellness to begin working your way toward a total recognition/total rewards program. To do so is to ensure that your company has elevated levels of employee engagement, a measuring stick that is now widely recognized as the most important for overall business success.
Time and time again, Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Study has shown that 70 percent of U.S. workers are not engaged at work and that the most successful companies are the ones that have the highest levels of employee engagement. Highly engaged companies benefit from having positive working re- lationships between employees and man- agers and employees and co-workers. This is not just the path toward improved safety and lower safety-related costs; it is also the path to walk if your goal is great- er customer retention, higher sales, and maximizing profits. Nothing will catch an executive’s attention quicker than a prom- ise of incremental profitable growth, and that is exactly the promise of today’s properly designed recognition/reward (engagement) programs.
To progress down the path from a single, to a bilateral, to a multilateral pro- gram will eventually take buy-in from managers in different silos and executives in the most key positions. It cannot (prag- matically speaking) take place overnight, so it intrinsically needs to take hold in one place and then spread throughout an organization. Safety departments tend to be the best environment for these “green shoots” to emerge, leading the way to- ward a true “Total Engagement Program” that drives overall organizational im- provement.
Brian Galonek, CPIM, is the President of All Star Incentive Marketing, a member of Incentive Engagement and Solution Pro- viders (IESP), a Strategic Industry Group within the Incentive Marketing Association (IMA, www.incentivemarketing.org).
62 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2017
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