3 Essential Elements to Developing and Maintaining Your Workers’ Compensation Program

You have prioritized risk management strategies, communicated expectations for incident reporting, and designed a thorough return-to-work program, but despite all this, your workers’ compensation program feels incomplete. What is holding you back from fulfilling the ultimate goals of your program?

“Risk managers may get caught up in developing substantial supportive measures for their workers’ compensation program and forget the best practice standards to its success,” said Beverly Covey, Senior Risk Control Manager at Safety National. “When the C-suite does not understand the value of enhancing and building out a program beyond the ‘bare bone’ elements, a risk manager may struggle to obtain the additional funding needed to improve safety measures, enhance technology, or add team members to support its goals.”

When reassessing the success of your current workers’ compensation program, consider the commitment toward these three areas.

Obtaining Executive Level Buy-In

While commitment from all levels of management is important, commitment from senior-level management is crucial to achieving an optimum workers’ compensation program. It is important to show every level of management how implementing a program will help to reduce costs and positively impact the bottom line. However, executive management’s “buy-in” will need to happen first.

View the program from their perspective. How will success be measured, and what obstacles might interfere with success? Cover all your bases by developing an enterprise risk management approach. What roles will all departments play in its success? The more knowledge and recommendations you have prepared when tailoring your pitch, the more likely you are to build trust and credibility with executive management.

Realizing the Cost and Savings

Many employers fail to realize the true cost of a workers’ compensation claim. Relating the cost directly to an organization’s profit margin (or tax rate) is just one way to demonstrate this. By working with your carrier, who often has resources like an incident calculator, you can quickly determine how much revenue is needed to pay for a claim.

Another way to gain support is to demonstrate the value of running a solid return-to-work process within your program. Your carrier can help generate a figure highlighting the potential savings of maintaining such a process.

Tracking the Right Data

Data is crucial in building and maintaining a best-practice workers’ compensation program. Data will help you determine your starting point, set performance goals, and monitor your program’s progress. Used effectively, data is also helpful in increasing visibility and gaining commitment from both executive management and front-line supervision.

As you define and track relevant data, ensure executive management is aware of the results. Properly tracked and reported data can convince even the most hesitant executive of the value of committing to a workers’ compensation program.

The data you provide to executive management might differ from data used in the operations side of the business. Executive management relies on “big picture” data, such as which division is performing the most poorly and what is the total incurred cost of workers’ compensation. General managers will need operational data such as the return-to-work ratio and number of lost days for their business unit. All levels of management should receive workers’ compensation data frequently broken down by department or division.