Collective Motivation System

Abandoning Fines: Why Traditional Demotivation No Longer Works

In HSE practice, the traditional approach based on punishments and bonus deprivation for violations increasingly demonstrates its inefficiency. Instead of raising the level of safety culture, this method creates an atmosphere of fear: workers begin to hide micro-injuries and near misses, and personal safety is observed only in the presence of supervisors. In his presentation, Vladislav Gumennik analyzes in detail the process of corporate culture transformation, where the company completely abandoned fines in favor of a collective motivation system.

A key step was the management's open declaration of a change in direction: the focus shifted from finding the guilty to encouraging safety leadership. This helped break down the barrier of distrust and stimulated personnel to proactively identify risks in the workplace.

Assessment System Architecture and Control Tools

To ensure objective motivation, the speaker uses the implemented system as an example to show how to digitize team engagement. The calculation is based on seven key indicators (K1 – K7) that cover all levels of the incident pyramid:

• Planning high-risk work and monitoring "Golden Rules": assessing the quality of preparation for the most risky operations, where historically the greatest severity of consequences is recorded.
• Safety cards and micro-injury registration: tools that allow identifying hazardous conditions before an accident occurs. Rewarding the recording of minor incidents sharply increases process transparency.
• Warning coupons: a color-coded system (green, yellow, red) that evaluates the risk-oriented behavior of a specific employee. The withdrawal of a coupon signals the foreman about the need to tighten control over the admission of this worker to hazardous tasks.
• Organizational proposals: assessing the team's activity in improving the safe organization of work.

The consolidated safety coefficient is calculated taking into account the average headcount of the department and the man-hours worked. This mathematically equalizes the chances of small teams and large workshops, making the competition fair.

Implementation Results and Safety Economics

The transition to collective responsibility directly affected the statistics: the company completely eliminated fatal injuries and reduced the level of minor injuries by 4.5 times. Workers began to independently eliminate violations through "Safety Cards" even before starting work, which significantly reduced the burden on the supervisory staff.

The speaker also analyzes the economic feasibility of the approach. A quarterly bonus fund of about 1.5 million rubles for 700 workers pays off completely. The company's costs to eliminate the consequences of one severe or fatal accident (including social payments) are approximately five times higher than this fund. An additional lever was the integration of safety results into the management rating: the career advancement of workshop managers directly depends on the places their departments occupy in the safety rating.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to calculate a fair safety coefficient for structural departments with different headcounts?
• How does the "Warning Coupons" system work and how does it affect personnel admission to high-risk work?
• How to argue to the CEO the need to allocate a budget for rewarding workers for safety?
• Why does canceling fines for violations lead to a decrease in injuries rather than a drop in discipline?
• How to integrate safety indicators into the career advancement system for line managers?