Delivery drivers: risk-taking cycle

The risk-taking cycle is a helpful model to explain some injury events. Most of the time, an employee is not injured when they take a risk by engaging in an unsafe act. They often complete a job more quickly without having to ask others for help. Task completion is a reward that reinforces unsafe behavior, making the worker more likely to repeat it. The risk of injury is always there and when it happens, as it will eventually, all the gains are erased. The cycle can be broken when workers realize that the short-term gain is not worth the risk of injury.

The risk-taking cycle

Takeaways

• People are not usually injured and are often able to get the job done more quickly when they engage in an unsafe act. This creates a “reward” for working unsafely.
• This “reward” reinforces the risk and causes them to continue to work unsafely.
• The two most common ways to break the cycle are:
  • an injury
  • training employees to recognize the real risks of their unsafe behavior.

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