pacesafety

Just wondering if anyone out there has incentivized safety. Our Worker's Comp. is getting a little excessive so we putting our heads together to figure out a way we can dispel some of these minor nagging injuries. We hardly ever have any lost time accidents, but a guy tweaks his back/shoulder/knee/whatever else and, though he doesn't take any time off, he is considerably slower.

What have you all done for safety incentive programs and have they worked?

Drywall1

Sorry man but I just try to keep my guys doing quality work at a good pace most of the time. Mabye if I was a large company I could hire a safety guy. But it seems safety guys only get hired when things are spiraling out of control. hmm makes me think....

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select drywall

Safety programs work if every one gets on board. I would say the best program I saw was when I worked for a company that every year told us where comp was at. save him money and get him a refund and he will split it with us. I think we each got like $500 bucks. When we saw somebody being stupid we told him even if the boss wasnt around. There is nothing you can do about nagging injuries. One thing we did was teach our hangers how to put no-coat beads on. If someone has a sore back we would let them put beads on for a week. They made some money at $2.00 a piece and werent carrying drywall around.

Gelo Tan

Safety incentive programs are designed and implemented in the hope of avoiding or minimizing accidents and injuries in and around the workplace. Safety incentive programs are designed as proactive programs that make employees exert extra effort and display an improved awareness in safeguarding the state of safety in and around the work area.


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Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.

cooper

I think three big things are making sure they are using the scaffolding, stilts, planks, etc. correctly, make sure they are operating their taping tools correctly (holding the box or bazooka a certain way can really mess you up), and make sure they clean up after themselves and move debris out of the way. Too many people walk on stilts in garages with pieces of wood laying around.

So basically, I would just suggest a safety meeting rather than paying them more to not get hurt...

TracyMC

It is not uncommon in big commercial companies to have a safety guy, we have one in each office, whether it is the shop foreman who has time to split with safety or a standalone employee. We offer a safety incentive to all of our hourly employees, to a national Outdoor goods supply house, equating to roughly $100 a quarter, based on no recordeable accidents or injuries. It is amazing how much of a difference it makes and how badly those guys want to make the incentive cut. This is a 40K expense to our branch , but it is more than covered by the L&I retro rebate for no incidents as well as a low ER rate. We couple them w/ weekly jobsite safety mtgs, Monthly foreman safety training, and quarterly 1/2 day full crew safety mtgs, as well as daily safety walks by Foreman , Superintendant, Project Managers, and Safety Manager on all Jobs, in one way or another, and a daily safety form filled out by the onsite staff management outlining days work, potential hazards, and jobsite safety issues not just for our guys , but all trades hazards, and it is given to the GC daily.
Trace

greenrabbi

Most incentive programs we have tried fail since the benefit of the workman's comp is more than we can offer to someone. We have been in and out of fraudulent claims so, we have actually started to investigating heavily into the claims to see how legit they are. There have been a few times we have caught the worker in another town doing work under the table while still on workers comp. Tricky game it can be!

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mj04

I find work safety difficult to get right too. Everyone knows it's important to implement good safety practices but it's just one of those things that ends up getting put on the back burner when work gets busy etc. It's not until something happens that it really makes you get your act together. I hadn't thought about implementing an incentive programme until now - thanks for this. Will maybe have a think about how this could work.