Effective incentive methods for security management

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This post was last edited by yinkuilin6868 on 2016-2-18 at 14:45. Motivation is an important tool in business management. Inappropriate incentive methods can destroy a company and may be the root cause of major disasters. The correctness of the motivation methods has a direct impact on employees’ work motivation, performance, and teamwork. Effective management stems from psychological mastery based on human nature; in particular, motivation strategies should be designed using the findings of social psychology and management psychology. Designing incentive methods arbitrarily without relying on psychological science can result in side effects from rewards or punishments, ultimately leading to serious unintended consequences. This paper combines findings from safety management and psychology to discuss effective motivation methods in safety management. 1. Resolving the issue of \"diffused responsibility\" is a prerequisite for safety incentives. The famous experiment on diffused responsibility is the \"epileptic seizure\" experiment, which showed that the more bystanders there were around the patient, the fewer people were willing to offer help. Psychological experiments have shown that the real cause of a decline in a sense of responsibility is \"diffusion of responsibility,\" not \"moral decay.\" This principle also applies to safety management; for instance, in the context of direct work permits, numerous fire accidents have shown that the personnel required to conduct safety reviews for hot work include the plant manager, safety manager, production manager, workshop supervisor, safety officer, supervisor, and more than six others. Yet in reality, no one goes to the site to verify the safety conditions. Accident analyses attribute this to a failure to fulfill responsibilities, but no one delves further into the root causes of such failures. Psychological experiments have shown that when responsibilities are too \"spread out,\" people unconsciously develop the mindset that \"someone else will do it; I’m busy right now.\" Motivation is intended to help employees fulfill their job responsibilities; by avoiding a dispersion of duties when defining them and reducing the number of people involved in each responsibility, it ensures that everyone has clear responsibilities to undertake, which plays a key role in the effective fulfillment of job duties. 2. Emotional rewards are more effective than material rewards. The “conversation experiments” conducted by Mayo and others at the Hawthorne Plant yielded unexpected results; this is what is known as the “conversation effect”: by patiently listening to the workers’ various opinions, production increased significantly and employee morale rose greatly. The key aspect of the behavior observation tools introduced by DuPont since the 1970s is the way in which managers communicate with employees, emphasizing listening and equal discussion. Eating meals with employees, greeting them proactively, and frequently asking about the difficulties they face at work or their progress – such small gestures – can boost employee morale more than material rewards. Similarly, when managers stand at a podium to train employees on safety protocols, it is far less effective than communicating with them in their work areas about the hazards and safety considerations involved in their tasks; this approach makes employees feel valued and cared for, and the psychological effect thus strengthens their compliance with safety regulations. The HSE observation initiative implemented by Sinopec aims to promote listening and caring communication between managers and employees at the work site. Currently, most companies implement quantitative assessments of employees’ safety performance and tie them closely to financial incentives. This may seem like a systematic and detailed approach to management, but it could actually be the beginning of weakening employees’ sense of responsibility for safety. Leaders at all levels should first show genuine care for their employees, provide emotional rewards, and boost their sense of responsibility and morale. 3. What level of punishment is scientific? Freedman conducted experiments in which children were prohibited from playing with a certain toy; the children in the group subjected to mild punishment still did not play with that toy when no one was around, while those in the group subjected to severe punishment definitely played with the forbidden toy when alone. Experimental results show that substantial rewards or severe punishments can provide strong external reasons for behavior. Therefore, if one person is required to do only one thing or is restricted to doing certain things just once, the best approach is to provide considerable rewards or punishments. However, if one wants the other party to develop a fixed attitude or behavior, the fewer rewards or punishments used to induce compliance, the greater the change in attitude that will occur, and the more lasting such change will be. The psychological reason for this behavior is the \"cognitive dissonance theory\"; that is, most people have a desire to be reasonable and moral individuals, and they change their attitudes and perceptions in order to find reasons for their actions. Minor rewards and punishments make people think that the requested actions are reasonable, and that changing behavior to meet those requirements is something one does as a moral person. In terms of safety management, the expectation from frontline employees is to avoid any violations of rules; those who impose severe penalties on employees for their first violation will find reasons to justify such violations in their own minds ； Conversely, imposing mild penalties for the first and second violations may lead to a change in behavior, which in turn can result in a change in attitude, achieving the goal of long-term behavioral change. If there has been no change, then the influence of an invisible team should be considered; it’s possible that all members of such a small team are engaged in such violations. In such cases, a \"kill the chicken to scare the monkeys\" approach can be adopted, by imposing severe penalties on a few individuals, such as dismissal, in order to change the behavior of the entire team. However, many domestic companies adopt an indifferent attitude toward violations; in psychology, there is also the effect that \"failing to punish is a form of reward.\" If violations are ignored, others will follow suit, leading to even more serious consequences. Therefore, \"fewer penalties\" does not mean \"no penalties at all\"; managers must impose penalties for every violation in order to foster a culture of compliance with rules and regulations. What is the concept of light punishment? If an employee is publicly identified throughout the factory and fined 50 yuan, which penalty is more severe? The answer is that severe penalties communicated throughout the entire factory are appropriate. At the current stage of economic development, employees’ need for self-respect is more urgent than their need for a small amount of money; therefore, measures that could damage employees’ reputation and hurt their self-respect should be used with caution. 4. Is it true that the greater the reward for identifying potential hazards, the better? An experiment with math games for elementary school students in 1976: during the initial baseline period, the students played math games for a few minutes each day without any rewards ； During the reward program, use prizes to encourage them to play math games ； Later, after the prizes were removed, the interest in playing the game was even lower than during the baseline period. Psychologists have thus derived the \"overjustification effect\": the tendency to believe that one’s behavior is caused by irresistible external factors, which leads to an underestimation of the possibility that internal factors are responsible for such behavior. The same principle applies to offering monetary rewards to employees for reporting hazards; such rewards make employees think that they report these hazards because of the money offered, rather than out of a sense of responsibility toward the factory, a sense of honor, or other internal motivations. When “money” becomes the motivation to identify hidden problems, will people go out of their way to create “leaks”? Or when he believes that more \"money\" should be obtained for a leak he has discovered, but less than what someone else gets, this can lead to a loss of motivation on his part to report such hazards. Therefore, the \"bend down to pick up gold\" measures implemented by some companies yield obvious short-term results, but their long-term effects may have the opposite effect. Employees who identify potential hazards can be rewarded, but the rewards need not all be in monetary form; they can take the shape of verbal praise or prizes, as monetary amounts are not obvious and lack a strong sense of comparison ； Financial rewards can only be given to those who contribute to emergency rescue efforts, and these should be accompanied by honorary awards such as prizes from the general manager and publicity in newspapers and magazines. The ideal state of safe behavior among employees is driven by internal motivation, which may be a self-perception of being responsible, or it may stem from a need for self-esteem or self-worth. These are precisely the higher-level needs in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. According to this theory, once people’s basic physiological and safety needs are met, they pursue the fulfillment of needs for \"love and belonging,\" \"respect,\" and \"self-actualization.\" Therefore, the arguments presented in this article are also in line with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory.