Building positive safety habits is an effective method for creating a sustainable safety culture, increasing ownership and oversight, and boosting employee morale.
There’s a wide range of ways that you can bring about a more positive safety culture in your workplace but in this blog, we’ll be focusing on two key areas – good catch incentives and positive safety celebrations.
So, let’s take a look at what they are and how you can implement them within your own organisation.
What Are Good Catch Incentives?
To understand what a good catch incentive is, you first need to know about near misses.
A near miss is an incident that could have happened, but someone reported the risk in time and resolved the issue.
For example, a team member may notice a spilt substance on the floor but clear it up before someone slips.
Read our blog for more near miss examples in the workplace.
Reporting a near miss and preventing potential harm to a fellow team member can be classified as a “good catch”.
Programmes that encourage and reward team members for reporting near misses are often referred to as good catch incentives.
The kind of programmes and rewards you can offer will depend on how your organisation is set up and how much resource you can allocate to these kinds of incentives.
Below, we list some common examples of good catch incentives used within workplaces.
Examples of Good Catch Incentives
- Reward system with a prize for the most engaged team or individual
- Public recognition during team meetings
- Flexible hours
- An extra day of paid annual leave
- A parking space
Find out what is important to your team and make these into rewards for reporting near misses.
What are Positive Safety Celebrations?
Positive safety celebrations are similar to good catch incentives, but reward more general safety behaviours as opposed to only near misses.
There could be a member of your team who responded quickly and effectively to an incident, or who proactively performs daily safety checks. Any behaviour that enforces strong SHEQ principles should be celebrated and used as a way to encourage others to act the same.
The ways in which positive safety actions can be rewarded are similar to those used as part of good catch incentive programmes and both can be run in tandem to instil a strong workplace culture.
Why Are They Both Important?
Integrating good catch incentives and positive safety celebrations into the daily running of your organisation can have a range of benefits to health and safety, such as:
- Increased individual ownership – when employees are rewarded and recognised on an individual basis, they’re more likely to see health and safety as a personal responsibility, not just a top-down organisational requirement.
- A sustainable safety culture – similarly, more active involvement on a company-wide level (not just the health and safety team) will help embed safety habits more permanently.
- Better employee morale – increased ownership and an improved culture make for a more pleasant and safe working environment, that will ultimately lead to a boost in employee morale.
How to Implement Positive Safety Habits
Once you’ve decided on how you will reward positive safety habits, you need to make sure you have the systems in place to support and capture these behaviours.
Education is a strong starting point as you can’t expect your team to report safety concerns if they’re not sure what they should be looking out for. Regular training or quizzes around key safety moments can help ensure that health and safety remains front of mind.
Similarly, after incidents or near misses, there should be transparency about how the situation was resolved so that you build a learning culture within your organisation and prevent the same mistakes from happening again.
Having an easy to use reporting system which makes it as simple as possible for your team to report near misses and incidents helps to remove any friction that could be a blocker to reporting.
Plus, a strong analytics set-up within your reporting tool will also make it easier to spot and reward safety champions, as you can see how engaged users are. As a manager, you can incorporate checking your EHS platform regularly to build out daily or weekly good catch reports that can be downloaded and distributed to the relevant team members.
How Vatix Can Help
Fostering a culture of proactive safety through good catch incentives and positive safety celebrations can significantly enhance employee engagement, accountability, and morale. However, to make these programmes truly effective, you need the right tools in place.
That’s where the Vatix platform comes in.
With its user-friendly reporting system, Vatix makes it easy for employees to report near misses and safety actions in real time, reducing friction and encouraging more frequent submissions. The platform’s robust analytics capabilities also allow managers to track engagement levels, identify safety champions, and generate actionable reports that support regular recognition and reward.
Combined with ongoing training and transparent incident resolution, Vatix helps organisations embed positive safety behaviours into their daily operations – building a stronger, more sustainable safety culture from the ground up.
See how Vatix can help you streamline reporting, reward positive safety behaviours, and strengthen your safety culture from day one.
Book a demo today and see how Vatix can help you streamline reporting, reward positive safety behaviours, and strengthen your safety culture.
