Effective Feedback
An Essential Part of Any Safety Incentive Program
BY PHIL LADUKE

Abraham Maslow postulated that safety is as much a human need as food, water, or air.

And even though, as one manufacturing executive once put it, “there can be no greater incentive for working safe than coming home uninjured,” more and more organizations are trying to improve the safety of the workplace by using safety incentives. From “Safety BINGO” to the distribution of “Safety Bucks,” safety incentives are increasingly used to reward workers when the company reaches safety milestones, like for instance, a month without a recordable injury.

When used correctly, safety incentives can heighten the awareness of workplace dangers, but if the program is not carefully designed and implemented, the company can inadvertently create a climate where workers are discouraged from reporting injuries for fear of jeopardizing the reward that they—and perhaps more importantly—their coworkers would otherwise receive.

But before a company should invest time and money putting together a safety incentive program, it should take a hard look at the most effective incentive for working safe: effective feedback.

There are four basic types of feedback:
• Silence;
• Criticism;
• Advice; and
• Reinforcement.

Silence

The absence of feedback is in itself feedback. When we provide silence as feedback we are literally communicating no information. Silence is useful in maintaining the status quo.

When a safety professional walks by a hazard or an unsafe behavior without comment, he or she tacitly endorses it as acceptable. While silence is useful for maintaining the status quo, doing so is seldom the goal in safety—either we are encountering situations where there is a clearly undesirable condition or there is a situation that we would like to see more widely adapted or done with greater frequency.

And when we overuse silence we decrease confidence—people need feedback to feel confident in what they are doing and when people aren’t confident they are more likely to make the kinds of mistakes that cause injuries. Another by-product of the overuse of silence is the reduction of worker performance, they feel unappreciated and undervalued. But the final and perhaps most destructive unintentional outcome of excessive silence is paranoia. As I’ve already explained, when we don’t get information we assume the worst, and when assume the worst over and over again we get paranoid and hostile.

The next style of feedback is criticism, that is, the identification of behaviors that we want changed and changed immediately. Criticism is probably the most overused feedback, but in some situations—the violation of a safety protocol that puts workers at serious risk of a fatality, for example—criticism is the most appropriate way to communicate. But these situations are far more rare than most of us belief and many of us tend to criticize when we should just shut up.

The overuse of criticism generates excuses and tends to eliminate other related behaviors. Take, for example, the worker who develops what he or she believes to be a process improvement but without meaning to, he or she creates an unsafe condition. Criticizing the worker is likely to result in the worker never showing initiative again and the workplace loses a key source of process innovations. And because too much criticism leads to worker excuses it impedes efforts to create a culture where the root cause of safety issues are quickly identified and resolved; excuses shut down honest dialog about the root cause of the problems.

Like the overuse of silence, taking criticism too far will decrease confidence so instead of having workers who are empowered to make decisions—especially in hazardous situations where seconds count—you end up with workers who do nothing because they fear making a mistake and inviting further criticism.

Overloading workers with criticism hurts relationships; if you spend most of your time criticizing workers (and we should include supervisors as well) they will tend to dislike you, feel that nothing will ever please you and stop trying. Clearly, this is not the situation we want when we are trying to make our role as the safety leader from police officer to coach and consultant.

Finally, an outcome of too much criticism is the development of escape and avoidance. And we see this phenomenon quite often in safety. Escape and avoidance describes the tendency of people to limit their exposure to people who continually criticize by avoiding the contact where possible and extricating themselves from the encounter as quickly as is humanly possible.

Does that sound familiar? If so, what you may be attributing to a lack of commitment to safety may simply be an outgrowth of your hyper-critical feedback.

Advice

Advice is a form of feedback used to identify progress toward the desired state and offers specifics on how to improve further. This form of feedback is used to shape or change behaviors to increase performance. Advice works like this: you begin by complimenting something that the person does well, preferably something related to the behavior you wish to improve.

Using our example from criticism (where the worker made what he thought was a process improvement), you might begin by recognizing his initiative in looking for process improvements before shifting to the importance of considering the impact that the change might have on the safety of the operation.

It’s fairly difficult to overuse advice, and the outcomes of advice are generally desirable because advice:
• Improves confidence;
• Can improve a troubled relationship; and
• Increases Performance. It’s not impossible to overuse advice, I know I’ve crossed the line when I compliment someone and once I’ve done so they say “but….”

Reinforcement

The final form of feedback is reinforcement and it is used to identify behaviors that were at or beyond the expected levels or to increase desired behaviors. Reinforcement in the form of sincere acknowledgment of the behavior is often more powerful than any external safety reward or recognition. When used appropriately reinforcement increases:

• Confidence;

• Performance; and

• Motivation.

Just like any other form of feedback, you can overdo it with reinforcement. If you inappropriately reinforce a behavior, you may inadvertently encourage related behaviors that are undesirable. You may also be seen as condescending or insincere if you use reinforcement too frequently.

So before you invest in prizes and contests designed to recognize safe work or provide incentives for improvements in safety, consider working with your team to improve how you provide feedback. FSM Phil LaDuke is director for Performance Improvement with O/E, a Troy, MI training consultancy.