On this episode of the WorkSAFE Podcast, we sit down with Kyle Mikel, Administrator for the city of Ashland, MO. Ashland employees participated in the 2024 Show Me Your Score Contest, used to promote safe driving solutions, and won with a score of 97.3 out of 100 points. We sit down with Mikel to discuss his experience with the contest and what he’s been doing to help keep his employees and community safe.
The 2024 Show Me Your Score contest: Real competition and real results
In the spring, MEM partnered with AAA, the Missouri Coalition for Roadway Safety, and Cambridge Telematics to encourage businesses to create awareness around roadway safety and driving habits. The 2024 Show Me Your Score contest encouraged business owners to hone in on driving safety by providing trackable data and exploring tangible results.
Employers across the state put their teams to the test. Participants were given free access to the DriveWell Go app. The app awards points for safe driving behavior. A $10,000 prize was awarded to the business with the highest driving score. At the end, Ashland, MO came away victorious.
Municipalities: Cities functioning as organizations
Ashland, MO is a municipality. Municipalities are corporate organizations that provide essential operations and safety support to a community. Ashland provides services for just over 5,000 Missouri residents. This includes water and sewer services, trash disposal and recycling, a police department, and general public works.
For a municipality, it’s important to mitigate safety risk where possible. For instance, fewer injuries generally lead to lower premium costs. This is a benefit that’s directly passed on to taxpayers. Mikel points out that municipalities operate within a finite budget. An injury could lead to higher premiums. This puts other key areas in jeopardy. For example, cutting future projects or reducing the workforce in certain departments.
Addressing a common safety exposure
At any one time in Ashland, there are many boots on the ground. Dozens of workers complete different types of critical work across the city. The Show Me Your Score contest presented Ashland with a unique opportunity to address a risk common to many roles: driving.
“We just leveled with staff said, you know, here’s an opportunity to gamify workplace safety,” Mikel shared. “I think that’s really what did it for for some staff members – an opportunity to compete against their peers and demonstrate those safe driving habits and put themselves in position to win prizes.”
Takeaways from the contest
Even with a time limit, the contest had lasting effects on employees. Not only did Ashland take home the main prize, but several team members took home individual prizes too. “Not only do we have the best overall score at the end of it as a company, but our individual drivers on on a weekly basis were outperforming a lot of folks that were participating in the program.”
Creative ways to implement safety
The Show Me Your Score contest is an example of gamifying safety. Employees set goals, see real-time results, and earn prizes. Mikel points out that it offers a steep contrast to typical safety trainings and exercises.
“Myself and a good handful of our employees, we come from a prior military experience or a military background where you have routine training,” he explained. “We call it ‘death by PowerPoint’ where we do safety briefings of some sort. I think that kind of ingrained in us a desire to avoid those types of training opportunities when they’re presented.”
Both trainings and contests have a place in a good safety culture. But Ashland also takes advantage of other ways to create a good safety culture, including:
- Spot checks. Employees win prizes for having on the right protective equipment on the job.
- Budgeting. If a new piece of equipment or safety training could be beneficial to the workplace, the team starts working it into the budget.
- Pursuing grants. For larger and more expensive safety initiatives, they identify specific situations where financial support could help and apply for it.
A mix of these methods creates a memorable and practical way to get employees to participate in safety. Further, it gets them thinking about their own contributions to the workplace environment.
Long-term impacts
A unique feature of the Drive Well Go app is that it tracks driving behavior 24/7. So Ashland employees received data about their driving habits not just on the job, but in their personal time, too. Mikel notes that a few employees went on long summer road trips – hundreds of mile or more. Their diligent driving kept their scores stable. Mikel points out how difficult of a task this can be, especially true when driving through big cities or large highways, where it is easy to drive faster to keep up with traffic.
The Ashland Chief of Police saw more possibility. The department is currently piloting a telemetric solution. This technology tracks the speed and driving behavior of police officers. “Speed is one of the leading causes of death for police officers,” Mikel added. The goal of the program is to identify when officers are speeding – and don’t need to be. Participating in the Show Me Your Score contest made adopting something more formal easier for the team to understand and accept.
Improving driving safety in your workplace
With or without a contest, driving safety is an important safety topic in the workplace. Mikel points that whether its a policy or a project, leadership buy-in is essential. Safety can’t be forced, but a good example can be followed. Among the first to sign up for the Show Me your Score contest were team leaders: supervisors, chiefs, heads of departments. Mikel points out that their example went a long way in encouraging others to join in.
Gamifying safety initiatives is also a great way to get employees talking about safety. Ashland employees often compared scores, bemoaning when a drop in score resulted from sudden braking or a spouse behind the wheel. They set up the app a few weeks before the contest, so employees would have a good handle on using it before things got started. A few employees still use the app on their phone.
“Focusing on that gamification process or some sort of reward and recognition process is is really important,” Mikel shared. “I think that helps keep safety at the forefront of our minds. More often than not, what you likely see is employees getting punished for not following safety policies and procedures. You probably will get a lot better feedback, a lot better participation and just a general improved culture around workplace safety if you focus on that reward and recognition versus the the punishment for not doing something that they they should be doing.”