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Jack Dennerlein, PhD
Harvard University
Boston, MA
Ph: 617-384-8812
Email: jax@hsph.harvard.edu
Year One:
The risks of working in the construction industry are many and sometimes overwhelming for a safety officer, often the only person on site with the sole responsibility for safety. Although there may be an implicit expectation that workers practice safe working conditions, the priority that they give to these activities usually depends upon the safety culture of the contractors and safety climate of the jobsite. Researchers are investigating whether incentive programs aimed at reinforcing acts that reduce risk (leading indicators) are more effective than traditional incentives based
on rates of reported injuries/illnesses (lagging indicators). Their approach is novel because no program reported in the literature to date has been evaluated with a control group.
How the Program Works
Each week Harvard conducts safety inspections on site. Inspectors take note of unsafe conditions as well as safe work practices and assign a score to each subcontractor.
These scores, as well as an overall safety score for the site, are displayed on
a worksite poster. If the site’s monthly safety score is above 96.3%, all workers
receive a free lunch.
Steps
Like many innovations, the rewards program described above did not emerge at once. Rather, it evolved during Year One. Throughout, however, the goal remained: to provide feedback to workers along with specific rewards to improve the project’s
safety performance.
Development of the program hinged around a few concepts: partnerships,
measurement, and communication. Dr.  Dennerlein noted that partnering with
the owner and general contractor was key to implementation. That relationship
was also pivotal in quantifying eligibility for the incentives. After securing access to Harvard’s safety inspection data, the team crafted plans on how to use this data to determine which contractors would receive the safety rewards. An analysis of the university’s safety scores over an 18-month period helped the researchers come up with an overall safety score (96.3%) that was attainable but also competitive.
Communication
Traditionally, feedback for project safety performance is limited to management. Dr. Dennerlein’s
idea was to expand that loop to include workers who could have a direct impact on mitigating
safety hazards. Since this was a new concept, researchers made an effort to secure buy-in from foremen early. During Year One, study staff also attended weekly meetings with foremen to encourage them to share their safety scores with workers. They also took other steps to create awareness. The team hired a consultant, Dana-Farber Health Communications Core, to develop a “brand” for the program that will be applied to graphics and print materials to make the program visible. Based on conversations with foremen, workers, and management, researchers developed a
10-minute toolbox talk to introduce the incentives program to new workers during their safety orientation meeting. The team also refined its reward scheme so that the whole site gets the reward lunch or it doesn’t. Their original approach was to reward individual contractors, but management and workers told them this type of incentive did not foster a positive group dynamic onsite.
Research Team and Partners: Harvard School of Public Health,
Harvard Construction Services Group, Predictive Solutions, Turner, Skanska, and DFCI Health Communications Core.
Abstract:
This proposed research project addresses the question; does adding a positive affirmation of safe practices (leading indicators) through an employee incentive-reward program improve the effectiveness of a well established safety program? Safety culture within the construction industry has many challenges, especially the distributed work force in an ever physically changing environment. One approach that has been used to change safety attitudes and behaviors is employee incentive based programs. To date no program has been evaluated with a comparison group and reported in the literature. Therefore, we, along with our partnership with the Harvard University Construction Services Group, propose to complete a randomized control trial intervention study of a safe working conditions incentive program. During this study, we will compare programs that are based on leading indicators (safe working conditions) and programs based on lagging indicators (injury and incident outcomes).
The overall project goal will be accomplished through the following specific aims: (1) We will develop a progressive incentive program that rewards workers, foremen, site supervisors and project managers for achieving a certain performance on safe work conditions (leading indicators of safety) as measured with a safety inspection tool and performance monitoring system within their groups (Year 1). In addition, we will track the safety performance metrics and analyze temporal patterns of safety performance in order to set specific criteria for the incentive reward system. (2) We will pilot test the system on two small worksites at Harvard University and refine the system based on the experience of completing the pilot tests (Year 1 and 2). (3) We will complete a randomized control intervention study on eight large scale construction projects with the novel incentive program structure, based on leading indicators, randomly assigned to four sites and conventional no-injury reporting incentive program (lagging indicators) as a control at the other sites (Years 2-5).
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