GiftCard Partners Blog

Gamification is a concept that is gaining popularity among employers to motivate employees to certain goals. Those goals can range from certain performance goals, to health and wellness goals, to workplace safety goals. Adding a gamification component to your workplace safety program can be a great way to keep safety top of mind for employees and decrease accident rates in your work space. Gamifying safety can be as simple as creating a public website, and for each day a worker, team of workers, or your entire workforce completes without an accident points can get added to a pool, which can then be cashed in for a variety of rewards. Some organizations opt for a more complex safety rewards game, creating teams, similar to fantasy sports, who compete against each other for points that can be later cashed in for rewards. This option allows the employer to track both individual and team performance, to find strengths and weaknesses organization-wide.

GiftCard Partners is finding that more and more of our customers are working to develop or enhance their safety program and instill the value of safety within their organization. Doing this does not need to be difficult but it does need to be taken seriously. Business & Legal Resources is here to help, discussing the importance of emphasizing your organizations safety culture with workers. BLR explains that the cost savings that come with a successful safety program is just a part of what you need to assess. Take a closer look at the safety culture in your organization and join BLR’s safety webinar about accurately assessing, and improving the role of safety in your workplace.
Learn more about the Safety Culture Webinar here and sign up to attend on February 13^th  

It’s not always easy to instill the message of safety within your workforce. So nip the issue in the bud from the very beginning: in the training process. Every employee who is required to follow the guidelines put forth in a safety program should go through this type of training. And to get the most out of this training
Safety Daily Advisor
put together,
50 Tips For More Effective Safety Training.
Here are a few do’s and don’ts from the report.
DO
give handouts,
DON’T
make them as hard to decipher as a 10 year olds art project.
Couple of interesting facts to consider, 90% of what people are told is forgotten within 24 hours and people process written information two times faster than the spoken word. Your handouts should reinforce your basic message, keep the attention of the reader, be easy to follow, and provide a reference point to readers in the future.
DO
consider using a little humor to reiterate your message,

but

DON’T
force it by incorporating
100 Funny Jokes to Tell Your Employees
book.
A little humor gives you the chance to wake up an audience that might be fading at the sight of too many safety statistics and OSHA guidelines. Experts say that using humor can relax an audience, making them more willing to participate. Which takes us to our next
DO.
DO
encourage interactive training,
DON’T
forget the incentives.
Encourage your workforce to get invested in their training program by getting creative with incentives. Create a short quiz at the end of each section, break the group into teams and play a trivial game about rules and statistics or have workers give safety demonstrations themselves. Then reward winners with small denomination gift cards to places like
CVS/pharmacy
or
AutoZone
.
Check out more great tips, news and advice for getting the most out of your company’s workplace safety program from
Safety Daily Advisors
.

Mobile recognition, Social, Interactive, Green…there are many key initiatives rolled up in Roy Saunderson’s Top 10 Trends for Employee Recognition in 2013, but he shows us that it’s not just important to identify the trends, but to also put them in context. It’s not surprising to see gift cards rank in top recognition trends for the new year, but Roy shares his insights around making recognition and incentives meaningful for the employee.
“6. Give me the cards I want." Employees will no longer be satisfied with mainstay gift cards from big box stores and established suppliers. Employees will demand to receive customized cards from meaningful places they prefer and not just what the employer deems everyone should get.” This bodes well for GCP’s strategy of bringing the most wanted gift card brands to employers for recognition rewards and incentives. It forces employers to not just toss a cash equivalent gift card at an employee, but to be thoughtful about the gift. Give gift cards to great restaurants so your employees take their families to dinner, pharmacy gift cards so families can be proactive with healthful and personal care purchases, retail apparel gift cards…often a real treat.
Check out the rest of Incentive’s Top 10 Trends for Employee Recognition in 2013