Safety Incentive Program Analysis

Incentive programs are usually designed to boost employee morale and provide a goal of improving in some area. Toyota Boshoku Tennessee LLC currently only offers an incentive program to the hourly plant team members based on safety, quality, and attendance. The program would be ranked as an external factor because it is based on a monetary incentive (Nassar, 2007). The safety incentive has a possibility of two levels, and if one team member has a recordable accident, the entire group loses. Attendance is based on the individual, and, therefore, each person can control the possibility of the attendance incentive. The area of improvement would be the quality incentive. Quality is based on parts per million, and the total of bad parts is negotiated down between the quality department and customers. Therefore, the program is designed to pay the quality incentive based on the negotiated number rather than the actual number. The team members are not held

Research has shown that monetary incentives are not the greatest motivator (Baer, 2014). Providing a challenge in order to receive a reward could potentially render improvement. A pizza party could be offered to each shift that produces a designated percentage decrease in bad parts. The idea could also be expanded to provide competition among shifts. The pizza party could only be offered to the shift that produced the largest percentage decrease of bad parts over a particular amount of time. Internal factors could also be initiated by verbally rewarding team members during the plant communication meetings. Internal factors consist of moral values, responsibility, and commitment to the job (Nassar, 2007). By occasionally stepping out of the box and publicly offering honest, sincere, verbal appreciation to the team members, managers would stand to gain respect, which would render continued improvements (Bragg,