What performance measures could a company use to identify and reward safe behavior in addition to counting injuries and illnesses?

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration have expressed concern that when companies set up programs to reward safety, they sometimes end up discouraging safe behavior. The problem occurs when companies offer incentives for low reports of injuries and illnesses-for example, giving a bonus if all the workers during a shift at a facility "work safely" with no accidents during a year. Under that type of program, if a worker does get hurt, the worker might feel bad about reporting the injury, or co-workers might discourage the worker from reporting the injury, because the injury report would cause them to lose the bonus.
Failure to report injuries can lead to future problems. For example, the failure to report could make it harder to identify and correct safety hazards. Also, a minor injury such as a repetitive-stress injury might keep getting worse until the employee can no longer bear to keep it a secret. In that case, the individual employee and company would have been better off if the employee had reported the injury sooner.
One alternative that has been suggested is for companies to reward employees for engaging in practices that increase safety rather than reward them for the absence of injury and illness reports.