Do safety incentives and rewards result to underreporting of safety incidents

Amazing, managers and supervisors of the most organization have fuelled this debate further. In fact, the most significant proportion of managers agrees that providing workers with incentives always have a negative consequence of reduced reporting to safety incidents. Depending on the type of organization, there several types of rewards and incentives that can be given to workers, ranging from monetary rewards, funded trips and paid days off. Moreover, Safety incentive programs also entail some behavior-based programs that include bonuses to the members who identify those conditions that might cause hazards to the organization. Preventive measures are also taken in advance to prevent such risks from occurring. Moreover, when safety incentives include programs that punish the members who unsafe in the organization, incident reports can be driven underground.

Some of the Organizations which reports high incidences of injuries put punitive measures to workers who have been identified with cases of injury. As a result of these measures, most workers fail to report injury cases especially when they know that any attempt to do that would result in them being punished. They will, therefore, do all their level best to ensure that safety issue remains underground. Henriqson, Éder et al. Some teams especially the strong ones decide to hide the weaknesses of their members and therefore, even when one of the members is a victim of an injury, the members feel that relationship is more important than the reward that they are to get in return. In addition to that, the presence of rewards and incentives in an organization reduces injury reports in the long.

Bouten (75) Asserts, there is no need to give employees an incentive for something that they know they should do. His argument lies on the ground that, workers know that they should work safely for the betterment of their health. Providing incentives, therefore, leads to Pavlov’s concept of classical conditioning. Therefore, providing incentives such as monetary rewards motivates the workers to protect themselves in the workplaces while aiming to boost their income. Measures that should be taken in place to ensure that safety incentives and rewards work without hiding injuries Although many articles and journals support the notion that safety incentives and rewards hide injuries, there are some measures that organizations should put in place to ensure that the incentives enhance safety without hiding injuries.

First, the managers of an organization should tailor the incentives and reward program in such a way that it is distributed among many workers. Where the incentives are in such a way that they are favorable only to the luckiest few, the rest of the members are de-motivated to work safely. In the long, the program may fail to work in the organization where such kind of a program is applied. Therefore, since, ineffective incentives and rewards drives incident reporting underground, the managers of various organizations should ensure that they find alternatives to incentives and rewards. The Alternatives to safety incentives and Rewards One of the alternatives to safety rewards and incentives is making the safety matter one of the core values of the organization.

It is essential for the managers to make it aware of the workers that safety needs are as critical as other aspects of the organization such as profits and production. In fact, they should always make sure that they talk about the safety needs in any meeting that they hold with the employees of the organization. By so doing, the employees will always make sure that they take personal care while working. Works Cited Bouten, Lies, and Sophie Hoozée. "Let's do it safely: how Altrad Balliauw configured a package of control systems. " Journal of cleaner production 136 (2016): 172-180. Henriqson, Éder, et al. "The constitution and effects of safety culture as an object in the discourse of accident prevention: A Foucauldian approach.