Safety Program Guide
Each year businesses spend $170 billion on occupational injury and illness costs. Many companies have been able to reduce the amount of money spent on injury and illness by implementing a safety program. According to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), these costs can be reduced by 20% - 40%.

Objectives
To start, you must identify the safety hazards that exist in your workplace. Use these hazards to identify what should change about the environment to make it safer. Then set specific objectives or goals.  Objectives should be specific, timely, and measurable. Identify specifically what behaviors need to change in order to reduce hazards in the workplace.

Tactics
Next identify tactics or actions that will accomplish each objective. Make these tactics both attainable by staff members and measurable.

Reward Structure
Next identify a realistic reward structure – rewarding each staff member when they accomplish a tactic.  Rewards should be personally meaningful to staff members and should have some relevance to the organization’s corporate culture. 

Marketing
Develop a marketing strategy for your safety program.  Companies market messages internally in a number of ways. Some common practices are:

• Posters
• Paycheck Stuffers
• Employee Safety Advocates

However, successful safety programs are promoted through managers directly to employees because managers have the greatest influence over the behavior of staff. 

A “kick-off” event should be planned to introduce this new program to the staff. This event should be the start of a continuous communication strategy focused on reinforcing the objectives of the program.

Evaluation
As you build the program, build in metrics of evaluation. Use these metrics to benchmark progress throughout the life of the program.

Sources:
http://www.osha.gov/Publications/safety-health-addvalue.pdf

Motivation Basics: Safety Program Guide, Incentive Magazine, http://www.incentivemag.com/incentive/reports_analysis/motivation_basics/guide_safety.jsp