Workplace Safety Incentives Since 1991
Recently, Safety Pays was contacted by a business management columnist based in New York. His articles, which have appeared in hundreds of trade journals nationwide, are designed to assist company owners and corporate managers with helpful approaches to overcoming problems common to every business. His interest in speaking with Safety Pays was to learn more about the use of incentives and why they are needed as an integral part of any company's loss control efforts.
The resulting article, which has been published in over a dozen national trade magazines, provides a number of very helpful ideas any company can use to beat the high cost of workers' comp. It also provides a valuable list of risk management resources to assist with these suggestions. The following 12 steps fall into two categories:
Working With Your Insurance Broker
1) Pay premiums only on straight time
2) Reclassify your employees
3) Pay small claims yourself
4) Find and correct clerical errors
5) Shop for the best carrier
6) Join drug-testing programs
7) Self-insure or join an association
Working With Your Employees
8) Institute A Safety Program
9) Use Incentives
10) Explain the problem to employees
11) Respond quickly to accidents
12) Plan transitional (light-duty) work positions
Because workers' comp expense ranks second only to payroll on many companies' balance sheets, it only makes sense to closely examine this list to see what cost reduction steps you may have overlooked. To not do so could be more expensive than you might think.
To illustrate, in the 1980's when the designer of Safety Pays joined a large west coast seafood distributor as its Executive Vice President, he discovered a number of employees who had moved out of operations and into administration had never been reclassified.
Because operations had a workers' comp rate classification of $20 per $100 in payroll as opposed to $1 per $100 for administration, the company had been overpaying its insurance carrier literally tens of thousands of dollars. So it pays to make sure all the bases are covered.