Star Perks™ Scores Solid Gains in Employee Motivation

appearing in Occupational Health & Safety Magazine

Fontaine Specialized

              Springville, Ala.-based Fontaine Specialized is in the business of manufacturing low-bed, heavy-duty trailers for the construction industry and the military. Consequently, the company’s approximately 175 production workers encounter some heavy-duty hazards.

“The average trailer has a carrying capacity of 55 tons,” said human resources manager Max Dover. “We’re dealing with some heavy steel.”

            Like Love-Dodgen of Denark Construction, Dover once was wary of incentives programs, owing to a prior “bad experience” with incentives at another company. But after implementing a safety incentives program at Fontaine Specialized in 2000 to help achieve the ambitious goal of zero lost-time accidents – “period, point blank, none” – he now swears by the company’s program.

            Dover points to some gaudy figures to state his case: He estimates workers’ compensation costs at Fontaine Specialized have dropped from $300,000 in 2000 to about $20,000 in 2004. As for the goal of no lost-time accidents, he said there’s been one in the past 3 years.

            “It’s just changed the attitude of the workers,” Dover said. “They work for each other now. If one worker sees someone doing something hazardous, he’ll stop him and offer to help or even suggest a better way to do it. They look out for each other now.”

            To achieve its ambitious goals, Fontaine Specialized turned to Bill Sims Jr., whose Columbia, S.C.-based performance Improvement Company offers safety incentives services and strategies.

In the first year of its program, Dover explains, Fontaine Specialized employees earned scratch-off cards – redeemable for prizes ranging from fishing gear to Florida vacations – for every month they worked without a personal injury (defined by Fontaine Specialized as any injury requiring a doctor visit). Employees also received a scratch-off card if their department collectively worked a month without a personal injury. All plant-level employees and supervisors were eligible.

            In the second year of the program, Dover added one more component: Employees also could earn scratch-off cards for working a month without a lost-time accident.

            Dover, chastened by his previous experience with incentives programs, noticed employees were reluctant to buy into the program in the beginning. But he said it “caught like wildfire” when they started getting the gifts they’d ordered from the Bill Sims Co. catalog, which has close to 100 pages of prizes in its most recent edition. Sims’ clients also are eligible for national drawings for prizes, including a Walt Disney World vacation, a Dodge Viper and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

            The point is this: Whatever route you take to implement your incentives program – whether your company creates its own program or seeks the counsel of a consultant – experts noted that awards must be genuine, meaningful, important and worth achieving to the worker.

            The potential dividends of an incentives program that applies that principle, as Dover explains, are “healthier, happier workers.”

            “They’re not afraid to work and you’re not spending the money elsewhere,” Dover said. “I’d rather give the money to my people rather than spend it on doctors.”

            Last month, our experts also talked about the importance of upper management commitment to a successful safety incentives program. Often, that starts with the safety or HR manager making a sales pitch to top brass.

            For Dover, that turned out to be a snap.

            “I had someone run some numbers for me: For every dollar we lost off the bottom line [from costs associated with a workplace injury], it took $25 in sales just to make that up,” Dover said. “It was a sales proposition by me, and it was easy when I got to 25 to 1.”

PG&E Corp.

            While nuclear power plants take great pains to keep workers and residents safe, generating nuclear energy always will be a process fraught with inherent dangers -- not the least of which is exposure to radiation.

            Elena Stokes, a former human resources employee with PG&E Corp. – whose subsidiary, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., provides power to about 14 million people in northern and central California -- wanted to create a safety incentives program that encouraged workers at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant and the Humboldt County electric plant to constantly be focused on safety. She also wanted the program to include everyone in the plant, from manual laborers to clerical workers to janitors.

            To determine the best approach, the two plants formed a committee comprised of representatives from every department. The committee studied the issue for a year and finally decided to engage the Bill Sims Co., which already had a program in place in one of the Diablo plant’s departments.

            The committee came up with its own creative twist: It decided to address safety issues with a “campaign of the month,” Stokes explains.

            If, for example, a worker fell off a scaffold and broke his leg, the committee would start a plantwide campaign calling upon all employees to submit ideas to avoid similar incidents in the future. To get the word out, the committee hung flyers and posters in common areas, while video monitors in every lunchroom would provide information on that month’s safety campaign. Stokes, who recently retired from PG&E, also would show up at department meetings throughout the plant to plug campaigns.

            The safety committee would meet twice a month – the company provided committee members with their own incentive, a catered lunch – to evaluate ideas. Workers received a “power dollar” certificate from the Bill Sims Co., redeemable for prizes, just for submitting their ideas. The committee then narrowed down the field to the top 10 ideas, and those 10 workers would receive more power dollars. The winner received even more, and was recognized at a plantwide meeting held twice a month.

             An incident wasn’t necessary to spark a campaign: Workers were encouraged to submit their own suggestions for a campaign of the month, Stokes says.

            Also successful for PG&E was its peer recognition program, in which workers used blank coupons – redeemable for merchandise from the Bill Sims Co. catalog – as thank-you notes.            “For instance, I could write one out as a thank-you to the person who works at the desk next to me,” Stokes said. “If she stayed late to help me get a project done before deadline, I would write on the coupon: ‘Thank you so much for the work you did on Dec. 3.’”

            In many cases, the recipients of the thank-you notes didn’t trade the coupons in for merchandise.

            Said Stokes: “There were many instances when the thank-you meant so much more than the value of the power dollar itself.”

            Stokes estimates the safety incentives program at the two power facilities in California resulted in a 50-percent drop in lost-time accidents.