This paper presents an examination of how to motivate employees for success in safety. Note that examination raises a two-fold issue:
How to motivate employees, and
How to apply that motivation for safety excellence.
The difference between "motivation" and "motivation for success" is in an organization's ability to use motivation effectively. Enthusiasm alone is useless unless it can be harnessed and directed properly to improve safety. Motivating employees to be merely enthusiastic about safety is insufficient. This paper is interested in how to motivate employees to be SUCCESSFUL in safety.
A working definition for motivation is:
A force that influences or causes a person to do something or act in a certain way.
So for the purposes of safety motivation the important question is:
How can an organization provide a "force that influences or causes" workers to be successful in the safety effort.
Let us consider the common methods that many organizations frequently use to increase employee motivation for safety, and evaluate how successful each method is likely to be:
Motivational speakers
Slogans, posters, signs
Discipline
Gain sharing programs
Contests, awards, incentives
How many motivational speakers have you heard in your career, and what do you remember of what they said? The purpose of using motivational speakers for safety is to get the attention of workers, rile them up, cause them to feel good, and give them energy for the effort. This method is effective in the short term, but loses its effect in a few weeks. The best motivational speakers are those that really do teach employees something that sticks with them rather than simply entertaining, amusing, or enthusing them with no real substance. The best motivational speaker for safety that I have heard is Charlie Morecraft, and what makes him good is that he is the genuine article. The worst motivational speakers are those that are so transparently fake that we get a little sick listening to them. In any case, it is unrealistic to think that having a motivational speaker speak to a workforce will do anything in itself to improve safety at a facility.
Slogans, signs and posters are designed to motivate employees to do the things management would like them to do. How effective are they? Do these methods cause workers to do the things that the slogans exhort them to do?
Zero injuries
Safety first
Pay attention
Its hard to see how these methods have much to do with anything other than making the people who put them up feel like they might have accomplished something.
