Clear. Fair. Consistent: Transforming the OHS Incentive System at Nornickel

Background for Revising Approaches to Industrial Safety Motivation

In large industrial companies, the occupational health and safety (OHS) incentive system often skews toward punitive measures, creating a barrier between operational personnel and safety departments. At the end of 2024, Nornickel conducted a comprehensive safety culture assessment using the Patrick Hudson model: while the overall company score was 2.87, the motivation area ranked lowest at 2.2.

Surveys and focus groups with frontline workers and line managers revealed three systemic issues. Employees did not understand the criteria for bonuses and disciplinary actions, feared inspections—to the point of attempting to leave their workstations or halt work when a safety officer appeared—and local regulations were overly complex. At one key facility, the document listing grounds for disciplinary action spanned 52 pages, making it impractical for actual mine or shop floor conditions. Alexey Avramenko, Head of Practice, Safety Culture Development Department at Nornickel, breaks down the stages of transforming this system—from auditing fragmented practices to implementing a unified digital standard.

Separating Rewards and Penalties: Auditing Existing Tools

The review showed that positive motivation tools were already in place and functioning within the company, but required updating and broader communication to staff. The reward system relies on several tracks:

• Team competitions between facilities and individual championships across four categories: heads of internal structural units, line managers, frontline workers, and occupational safety specialists.
• Financial incentives for completing critical assignments, as well as payouts for logging risks in the corporate digital rapid hazard identification system, proposing corrective actions, and personally participating in hazard mitigation. To standardize conditions across the board, the internal policy mandated allocating a fixed share of branch budgets to reward employees for identified hazards.
• A multi-tiered system of non-financial recognition—from local site-level awards to corporate and state honors, where a workplace fatality within a unit serves as a disqualifying criterion for managers.

A challenging situation emerged regarding negative motivation. An analysis of data for the first half of 2025 across 15 facilities, covering over 80% of operational personnel, revealed a lack of consistent logic in applying disciplinary actions. Paper orders did not match SAP exports, some documents were issued without sign-off from the OHS department, and the very same specialist could issue completely different penalties for identical violations during a single walkthrough. Meanwhile, cross-referencing disciplinary records with incident statistics for 2024–2025 showed a 100% correlation with fatalities, over 60% correlation with high-potential incidents (HiPos), and over 50% with severe injuries.

The "1+1" Matrix and Cross-Functional Digitalization of the Process

To eliminate discrepancies, a cross-functional team was brought into the project: OHS specialists, operations managers, HR, legal counsel, regulatory compliance, and IT specialists. Instead of multi-page regulations, a "1+1" format was developed—a single page of clear criteria for workers and a single page for line managers, focused on work organization and operational control.

The pilot ran across three diverse assets: a mine, a concentrator, and a repair and construction trust. Through 85 engagement sessions involving 1,700 employees, the initial list of 12 items was narrowed down to 10 transparent criteria covering over 80% of actual injury causes:

• Unconditional dismissal was retained for violating the six Cardinal Safety Rules.
• Criteria 1 through 7 cover violations that have led to minor, moderate, and severe injuries: the first offense results in a formal warning, the second in a reprimand, and the third in a reprimand with a mandatory 50% bonus reduction and a review of fitness for the role. Managers also retain the right to apply a bonus reduction at the first two stages.
• Criteria 8 through 10 cover critical deviations from rules associated with fatalities and major accidents: here, a 50% bonus reduction is mandatory from the very first offense, alongside formal disciplinary action.
• Violations outside the core list are addressed through preventive coaching, a behavioral safety audit, or a 25% bonus reduction without issuing a formal warning or reprimand. All financial measures are aligned with labor law requirements, which cap pay deductions at 20% of average monthly earnings.

In parallel, the process was fully migrated to the corporate electronic document management system. A unified clickable template for administrative orders with a built-in directory was introduced: selecting a criterion automatically assigns a violation code for direct transfer to SAP. This cut HR processing time for orders by more than 50% and made OHS department approval mandatory. During the pilot, 100% of orders (48 documents) went through the digital workflow, and the share of employees well-versed in the new rules reached 90%. The heads of the operational facilities themselves presented the pilot results to the steering committee, leading to a decision to roll out the system company-wide by the end of 2027 and deploy artificial intelligence to block attempts to route orders through non-standard approval workflows.

What You Will Learn from This Presentation

• How to audit disciplinary practices across industrial sites and link reprimand statistics to the root causes of fatal and severe injuries?
• How to transform 52-page regulations into single-page accountability matrices tailored separately for frontline workers and line managers?
• How to balance a strict penalty scale, legal caps on bonus reductions, and the discretionary authority of site managers?
• What electronic document management settings and unified coding systems can synchronize order issuance with SAP and prevent bypassing the OHS department?
• How to manage shop-floor resistance during the pilot phase and engage plant directors in championing the project before executive management?