Should Management Reward Investigators for Good Investigations?
Here are the results (from 2010) of my unscientific survey of TapRooT® Users:
Never Receive Rewards from Management for a Good Investigation: 76%
Get a Verbal “Atta-Boy/Girl” for Investigations: 20%
Get a Financial Reward for Investigations: 4%
I didn’t find these statistics surprising at the time. Do you think they have changed?
I also found it interesting that many of the investigators said that performing a good investigation and seeing people’s jobs get better (safer) was reward enough.
However, if managers want good investigations, shouldn’t they be rewarding what they want? Isn’t that Management 101?
Therefore, one major improvement management should consider for improving investigations is to start a systematic evaluation of investigations and rewards for good investigations.
What do you think?
Are managers supposed to hand out bonuses to everyone that does their job correctly?
Or replace the people who do their job incorrectly?
Neither.
First, managers should make sure people are trained and have the resources needed to do their job.
Next, managers should reward success. This doesn’t have to be bonuses.
If the person isn’t performing an investigation properly, managers should coach the individual to help them or find out what resources were missing and make sure that they have what they need next time.
The most frequent causes of poor investigations are:
1. A blame culture.
2. Inadequate training of investigators.
3. Supervisors doing investigations in their spare time. (A lack of time and support to do a proper investigation.
If we wanted to put it another way, how accurate would it be to say; not enough organizations have educated their management to know the value of competent investigations, and to know what a meaningful and competent incident investigation should look like?
True