Employee Involvement in Developing a Safety Culture at NLMK Group

Lack of Financial Motivation as a Conscious Choice

Developing a safety culture at complex industrial facilities is impossible without mass employee involvement. However, in practice, occupational safety specialists often face the "money first, chairs later" attitude — a reluctance to take on additional workload without direct financial compensation. Alexander Zubkov, Chief Specialist for Leadership Development at NLMK Group, analyzes the company's experience in creating a reward system that fundamentally rejected monetary motivation, yet increased the number of involved employees 12-fold over three years.

The speaker emphasizes that the rejection of direct payments was the initial goal when launching the program in 2020. Instead, the company relied on recognizing achievements, gamification (corporate currency), and large-scale competition mechanics united under the "President's Award" brand.

Architecture of the Recognition System: From Initiative to the "President's Award"

The presentation details the structure of the reward system, which includes both regular and competitive elements. Regular rewards are based on five key criteria of target behavior:

• Stopping unsafe work — forming a culture of zero tolerance for risks.
• Identifying hazards and risks — a proactive approach to workplace safety.
• Identifying violations of cardinal rules — monitoring compliance with critical requirements.
• Submitting HSE initiatives — involving employees in the improvement process.
• Reinforcing behavioral safety dialogues — developing communication between managers and subordinates.

For these actions, employees receive verbal gratitude, letters of appreciation, and corporate currency — points that can be exchanged for branded merchandise. The competitive part (the "President's Award") includes individual, collective, and individual-group nominations, the winners of which are determined first at the enterprise level and then at the Group level.

Implementation Results and Impact on Injury Rates

The speaker uses specific figures to show how non-financial motivation works. Over three years, the number of submitted HSE initiatives increased 34 times, hazard identification doubled, and the number of behavioral dialogues increased more than 3 times. The number of competition nominees grew from 100 to over 1,000 people.

The main result of this work was a 1.9-fold reduction in the company's strategic indicator — the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) — during the program's operation. This confirms the thesis that employee involvement directly affects the level of safety.

System Development: New Criteria, Contractors, and Automation

The system does not stand still. In 2022, new criteria for regular rewards were added, including improving incident registration and rewarding teams that have worked 5 or more years without lost-time injuries. The number of such departments is steadily growing, indicating the sustainability of the safety culture.

An important step was the involvement of contracting organizations in the competitive nominations, for which unified evaluation criteria were developed. In addition, the company is actively working on automating the application process for competitions to minimize routine operations and attract employees who were previously deterred by the complexity of the paperwork.

Fighting Formalism and Manipulation

Answering questions from the audience, Alexander Zubkov touched upon an important problem — the risk of formalism and attempts to artificially inflate indicators to receive awards. To combat this, NLMK has built a multi-level control system: from verification at the structural unit level to a final audit by the HSE department. When violations are detected, the company does not put employees on a "blacklist," but conducts training, explaining how to properly record useful actions.

What You Will Learn from This Webinar:

• How to build a safety reward system without using direct cash payments?
• Which criteria of target behavior have the greatest effect on reducing injury rates?
• How to involve not only your own employees but also contracting organizations in the recognition program?
• How to combat formalism and the artificial inflation of indicators when registering useful actions?
• How to overcome employee resistance during the implementation of new motivation tools?