Safety Incentive Programs within New OSHA Rule Guidelines

In May 2016 OSHA updated its rule regarding employee injury reporting. The rule explicitly states:

“You must establish a reasonable procedure for employees to report work-related injuries and illnesses promptly and accurately. A procedure is not reasonable if it would deter or discourage a reasonable employee from accurately reporting a workplace injury or illness”

OSHA, through its comments on the rule, have identified that three specific types of policies which it believes may discourage a reasonable employee: disciplinary policies, post-accident drug testing policies, and employee incentive programs. All three of these are key components of a thorough fast food worker compensation safety program. This blog entry looks at what components of employee incentive programs were deemed to reasonably deter injury reporting.

OSHA noted that some incentive programs used rate based factors to determine rewards (i.e. no injuries in a month warranted a reward). Obviously, to an employee one way to control whether the company believes there were injuries is to not report the injury. This is even more true when incentives are tied to cash or pay/wages. As such reward programs should be behavior focused or, if rate based, should focus on improvement of rates and not the elimination of injuries.

Another method of keeping within OSHA’s good graces is to make sure your fast food franchise uses a multi-level incentive program. That is multi-level in terms of rewarding groups and individuals; rewarding managers and employees; and using cash and non-cash incentives. For instance, a company could:

1. Provide free slip free shoes to an individual for longevity without injury

2. Provide free a pay increase to the shift with the most improved claim history and

3. Provide a group outing to the store with the highest number of hours of employee training

Although a program like this might be looked at by OSHA because of the use of rate based factors and cash incentives, it would likely survive scrutiny because it would be unreasonable for an employee viewing the overall program to be deterred from reporting their injury.

Finally employee engagement in establishing and monitoring the safety program makes it obvious that the goal is safety as opposed to prevention of injury reporting. Employees can be engaged by being tasked to set goals, give feed back on efficacy of training and equipment vendors, and participate in safety meetings and safety policy/rule promulgation.

There appear to be ways of modifying your fast food workers' compensation safety incentive program to meet the new OSHA standards without having to throw the baby out with the bath water. If you need assistance in devising such a program, contact Insurance Design & Placement, Inc.