Determining Safety Inspection Thresholds for Employee Incentives Programs on Construction Sites

Area of Science:

• Occupational Health and Safety
• Construction Management
• Incentive Program Design

Background:

• Safety inspections assess physical working conditions on construction sites.
• Safety scores from inspections can be utilized in employee incentive programs.
• Establishing appropriate threshold scores for safety incentive programs remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate different methods for determining numerical safety inspection scores.
• To identify the optimal threshold score for activating rewards in employee safety incentive programs.
• To assess the effectiveness of various data grouping approaches for setting safety score thresholds.

Main Methods:

• Explored five data grouping methods: owner, general contractor, project, trade, and subcontractor.
• Used median values from grouped safety inspection data to establish threshold scores.
• Applied these approaches to a completed project to analyze reward frequency and distribution.
• Qualitatively evaluated each approach for consistency, competitiveness, attainability, and fairness.

Main Results:

• The owner-specific approach yielded a threshold score of 96.3%.
• This approach met all qualitative evaluation goals, demonstrating consistency, competitiveness, attainability, and fairness.
• It offered the most competitive reward distribution, occurring during one-third of the project duration, while remaining attainable.

Conclusions:

• The owner-based approach for threshold determination is recommended for owners and general contractors designing leading indicator incentive programs.
• This method ensures fairness and consistency by treating all workers equally and maintaining a stable threshold.
• The findings can inform future research on the effectiveness of safety incentive programs in construction.