Do Safety Incentives Discourage Workers from Reporting Injuries?

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Safety incentive programs can be effective and help increase safety awareness and change safety cultures if designed correctly.
I have worked with thousands of clients over the past 19 years in designing safety recognition programs that target the behaviors to working safely. You need to target near miss reporting, safety suggestions, safety audits, training. Make the award frequent is also a key, make sure you are rewarding weekly for different activities and make sure you are rewarding EVERYONE and not just the lucky few who get the correct numbers on a BINGO card or get their name drawn out of a hat.

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The elephant in the room is there already exits a big financial incentive to report injuries called the workers compensation system,which is ripe for abuse and fraud. Workers spend 16 of the 24 hours a day outside of work so there is a better than 50 % probability that activities outside of work significantly contribute to any pains ands strains that they may report. Having a refinery blow up, probably has little to do with employees reporting a twisted ankle. Most employees are not professional engineers, doing process fault tree analysis. The BP deepwater rig did not explode because a worker failed to report neck pain. That was a financail decision to use a less effective, cheaper blow out preventer. However a culture that encourages cheap shortcuts and production speed over quality is a recipe for safety disaster.