Employee Recognition & Engagement Resources

According to OSHA®, the cost of direct workers’ compensation claims is estimated to be around $1 billion per week. Ensuring employee safety can be a challenge, particularly in a non-engaged work culture.

As 2016 comes to a close, OSHA® has revealed their annual Top Ten OSHA® Citations list. The list – which is released every October – takes a look at the most frequently cited safety and health violations for the given fiscal year.

OSHA® – the Occupational Safety and Health Administration – recently announced some updates to their new Severe Injury Reporting Program, which requires companies to report any serious injury or hospitalization within 24 hours. The first year was found to be quite effective for the companies that complied. Unfortunately, not all businesses did. Thus, the agency announced that they would be issuing even more citations and increasing the amount of fines in the second year of the program

For decades, C.A. Short Company has been assisting various organizations with their safety and incentive programs. Each day we aim to help facilitate and execute companies’ ongoing initiatives, while assisting employees and managers to better mitigate risk. Through years of experience, we have realized that the companies that truly thrive are those who go one step further and engage their employees on every level. Utilizing this knowledge, we developed a powerful new concept aimed at helping every brand build upon these universal successes.

I just attended the RPI (Recognition Professionals International) Summit in sunny but chilly Las Vegas and learned a great deal about Recognition and Rewards. One of the sessions I attended was “The Behavioral Economics of Incentives” by Scott Jeffrey, a PH.D with Monmouth University. The premise of his session was understanding what deliverable is best to drive the behavior you want and what he shared was not what I expected. It turns out that cash is not king if the desired outcome of your incentive program is to drive and maintain a high level of employee engagement.

As we sat through the session we were treated to an interesting psychological history lesson of the mindset of human beings and their decision making process. Moreover, we learned what most people will say when given a choice versus what an organization should take into account before rolling out a recognition program. His presentation included references to studies of hundreds of sales people, line-workers, studies from Incentive Magazine, a book by John Maurice Clark Economics and Modern Psychology and others.

Does your company have meaningful and engaging employee recognition?

Recognition is being implemented by many organizations. A common problem, however, is having too many autonomous programs that are not producing the desired outcomes on employee engagement and achieving organizational goals. Examples of these autonomous programs include, but are not limited to:

• Wellness

• Attendance

• Safety

• Holiday

• Employee of the month

While organizations are budgeting for recognition programs, they are rarely evaluating if the allocated funds are being well spent. When spent on a departmental basis, the results are not consistent across the organization. Some employees are feeling appreciated while others are receiving no recognition at all.

Every company wants to claim that they have a strong safety culture and have taken the necessary steps to identify areas to focus and improve on, while at the same time, providing their employees with the tools and training needed to maintain a safe work environment. The key to a successful safety program is having an engaged workforce that understands the organization's safety objectives and the individual safe behaviors that are expected from them.