Workers Comp Boot
Camp Lowers Costs |
Want to control or lower your workers comp costs? Maybe what your business needs is a workers compensation boot camp?
When Textron Automotive, Troy, MI, decided to take a look at its initiative, they started by getting cost information.
"Safety is important from the human side, but we also wanted to see what it directly was doing to the business side," said Doug Hamrick, director, environmental health, safety and energy at Textron. "We started with workers compensation."
The company used an actuary and an advisor from its third-party administrator to help define the indirect costs of workers comp. They found that the lost productivity, scrap parts and operational upsets were anywhere from 5 to 7 times more than the direct costs. So, for every dollar spent on workers comp they were spending 5 to 7 dollars more in operation costs.
The next question was: Why? "We went into the operation and looked around and saw that our people in
general didn’t know how to manage workers compensation." Said Hamrick, "We are self-insured, with a third-party administrator, and a lot of our plants didn’t understand how that worked. They didn’t do claims management very well, didn’t understand their rights and responsibilities. We set out to change that."
That is when the workers comp boot camp was born. The company did two things: (1) developed standards of performance and (2) developed an educational process to train people in the workers comp process.
"The whole focal point of the workers compensation process is return-to-work," said Hamrick. "If you think of it as a wheel, the hub of the wheel is return-to-work. All of the different spokes are things such as: Timely reporting of claims, medical service provider performance, third party administrator performance and insurance company performance."
During the boot camp employees spend five days learning about the many aspects of workers comp. Things like:
 What workers comp is and why it exists.
What a claim is and what happens when it is filed.
What are the rights and responsibilities of the injured workers and the employer?
Return-to-work techniques and how to work with doctors and medical management.
How to audit files of insurance companies and third party administrators.
Hamrick says that the program has been very successful. In the first five years the company sent 300 people through the boot camp. The company cut workers comp expenditures in half.
Hamrick pointed out that workers comp is only one side of the coin. The other side is improved safety. In the first five years, Textron reduced total accidents by about 65 percent, and lost-time accidents by nearly 70 percent. They also reduced number of days away from work or what they call "lost time severity rate" by nearly 90 percent. Out of 50 facilities worldwide Textron had fewer than 1,000 total injuries per year and fewer than 100 lost-time injuries per year.
Once an employee is back at work Textron makes sure the person is involved in a productive assignment. Hamrick said many employers fail in return to work because they bring people back to count ceiling tiles. "People get bored and feel like it is a punishment if they are restricted to just sweeping up."
Textron developed a template for each plant listing down a column all of the physical restrictions they could possibly think of. Across the top of the matrix, a list of all of the different jobs and tasks that are in that particular plant. Then, they can be matched up. If somebody is limited to right hand work only, the supervisor can look down the list and say, "Yes we can accommodate this person. They can do these different jobs."
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