I saw this article in the Atlanta Business Chronicle yesterday, and its safety theme caught my eye.  Needless to say, 27% of anything is probably not something to be lauded.  My first reaction was what about the other 73%?  Yikes.

After my initial shock, I read the article and many area hospitals (including the one I would go to if needed) were in the A/B range.  It also mentioned that many of the hospitals had shown significant improvement since the prior year, which allowed me time to thank my parents for providing me with a healthy immune system!

The reason why I decided to write about this article is that our company designs and implements safety programs to a variety of industries.  While some of these hospitals may be good candidates for a safety program, there are many others that would not be.  Most people would probably assume that the hospitals that fall into the D/F range would be the obvious choices to implement a safety program promoting safe practices and training, etc.  However, that is not necessarily the case.

I would argue that those companies that fall into a D/F range regardless of industry probably do not have the processes in place in order to successfully implement a safety program.  I would most likely target the B/C hospitals named in this article, because they at least have some of the processes in place to become safer, and there is also room for improvement.  They are also already measuring some of those behaviors that we would target with a safety program, so we would be able to measure the impact of our program after it had been implemented.

To take this a little more granularly, most of our successful programs actually target the second or third tier of participants.  For example, if you were a manufacturer and sold through a distribution channel our program would probably not be very successful for your top-end distributors that are already spending all or most of their money with you.  The target would most likely be those distributors that only spend a portion of their budget with your company, but are also buying products from one or several of your competitors.  Similar to the safety program mentioned above, there is room for improvement.  In this case, there would be a switch in spend from your competitors to you, which once again is something we can measure.

by Mike Sullivan

Mike has more than 15 years of experience designing and implementing incentive and recognition programs. He specializes in employee recognition and multi-step channel sales incentive programs. When not tending to his clients’ needs, Mike can be found wetting a line on a local waterway or traversing a hiking trail with his wife Michelle.