Ideas That Work: Rotate Rewards to Keep Staff Interested

Practical pearls from your colleagues

Rewarding staff for preventing errors and keeping patients safe are the means to an end every surgical leader strives to achieve: Having a true culture of safety in place.

Incentive programs are proven and proactive ways to reduce risk of harm to both patients and staff, but there’s one major caveat to these programs. “You need to try new ideas to maintain interest and switch it up when enthusiasm starts to wane,” says Laurie Wolf, PhD, CPE, ASQ-CSSBB, director of human factors implementation at the Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, Va. “Activities must be changed up frequently to keep it fresh and entertaining to enhance participation.”

That’s what the Pharmacy Department at Carilion Clinic has been doing for the past five years. It all started with an initiative called “Something to Crow About.” According to Dr. Wolf, that initiative was centered on recognizing and shouting out standout colleagues by submitting descriptions of what said colleagues did that was worth “crowing about.” It also consisted of staff placing a marble into a jar to represent each submission as an effective visualization of all the good things that were happening. “Essentially any time a staff member turned in another staff member for going above and beyond, helping out, picking up extra shifts, running a STAT med for someone else, they could be placed into a raffle for a free monthly lunch,” she says. 

The program took a safety slant when marbles were placed in the jar for every event in which staff reported something positive done by a coworker to improve patient safety. “For each marble, the name of the person was put into a hat for a drawing at the end of the month for a reward (like a gift certificate),” says Dr. Wolf, who adds that the initiative worked well until it didn’t. “Not everyone had the same definition of above and beyond, and some thought we were stacking the deck,” she says.

For now, the Carilion Pharmacy team has adjusted their incentive program slightly. The incentive is now called LOL (Lunch on Larry), after the executive leader of the pharmacy department, and is basically a simple raffle that aims to be inclusive of the entire department. “The winner of the raffle receives a lunch certificate that’s a Carilion Meal voucher to the hospital cafeteria,” says Dr. Wolf, who fully expects LOL to morph into another type of program sometime in the near future to keep interest strong. When it comes to incentive programs, she says, especially those geared toward bolstering safety, facilities must remain nimble. “With these types of programs, you really need to switch it up every three or four months and do something different,” says Dr. Wolf. OSM