When Geoffrey Smith joined the risk management team at Iron Mountain in 2008, it was clear that the company required a sea change when it came to its workers' compensation program.

As the largest records-management company in the U.S. with operations in 35 countries, Iron Mountain's employees face a number of on-the-job exposures. “We pick up and store boxes of customer paper records, computer tapes and media, and then return these records to our customers upon request,” explains Smith—boxes that can easily weigh up to 80 pounds. As a result, back and shoulder injuries are common.

By 2009, every year 1 out of 3 Iron Mountain employees were going to the hospital with some sort of work-related injury. Workers' comp costs were close to $18 million a year, and growing at a 10% clip.

“Our organization was also growing extremely fast through acquisition,” Smith recalls. “We were acquiring a lot of companies that did not have a solid safety culture within them, and there wasn't a lot of focus, at that point, on trying to make it a safer place.”

The risk management department realized the company needed to make some fundamental changes. After getting buy-in from senior management, they worked together on a comprehensive approach to keep injuries and costs under control by creating a better safety culture, adding a return-to-work program, and installing an effective claims management program with a more personal approach. They then set a goal of reducing their costs by half within five years.

Iron Mountain began by hiring a receptionist in its corporate offices in Boston to serve in a new role within the workers' comp department. “She didn't know the first thing about workers' compensation,” says Smith. “But that was what I wanted.” When an employee was injured, it was this person's job to call him or her and find out what happened and what Iron Mountain could do to help.

“It's basically just making that first connection so that the employee realizes that, 'Oh, I'm not just going to go home and sit on the couch for two weeks,'” Smith says. “It's a very hands-on approach, which I think a lot of companies don't necessarily do.”

Making that initial connection with its injured employees sends a message that the company cares and wants to help them get back to work as soon as possible, instead of simply giving them a check and leaving them to wait around while they recover.

“We're not just opening up the piggy bank saying, 'Whatever hurts, we're going to fix it for you,'” says Smith. “If you're hurt on the job, we're going to get you the medical attention that you need from quality medical providers, and we're going to help you get back to work. And we're going to expect you to work with us to get back to work.” If work is not available in a facility within the employee's work restrictions, Iron Mountain will work with an outside vendor to let injured employees work in a local not-for-profit agency, such as the American Council for the Blind or the United Way Food Bank, so they can stay active.

Injured employees are also getting calls from two claims specialists, a nurse case manager on staff, and their department supervisors, all incentivized to help employees keep working. “Now their supervisor is getting charged $3,500 for every accident, and if there's lost time involved, it's a $15,000 charge,” says Smith. “And if they lose more than 30 days, it's $40,000. So now they're on the phone with us and with the employee.”

Not surprisingly, helping employees return to work as quickly as possible also helps keep litigation costs down. “People sit on the couch at home and they see the daytime TV ad from the attorney's office saying, 'Hurt on the job?'” says Smith, who understands that there's no shortage of attorneys looking to make a quick buck by settling cases out of court with a besieged employer. By getting employees back to work, the company is avoiding many of these incidences.

Smith says the new approach also helps reduce the number of fraudulent claims, without treating employees like criminals. The previous claims manager's approach was to hand cases off to the insurance carrier, Smith says, and if there was any lost time involved, an investigator was hired. “That just runs up the cost of handling the claim.

“If you go into claims management with the mindset that these people are just trying to get a free ride and they're doing everything they can to not get back to work, then, number one, you have an extremely low opinion of your employee population, and two, you're not being fair to those people [who] are legitimately hurt,” Smith stresses.

Today, Iron Mountain's claims specialists are trained to identify any red flags within a claim. If they find any, an investigator gets involved and determines whether an employee is attempting to commit fraud. If it is discovered that he or she is, the file gets turned over to the attorney general's office for insurance fraud. “That sends a message to the employee population as well.”

For the most part, though, Smith says workplace injuries are preventable. So along with better claims management, he and his team are also working to drive down workers' comp costs by establishing a better safety environment across its operations. Smith says by making workplace safety a part of every employees' day-to-day life, the number of injuries can be greatly reduced.

“I think if you went to our employees now, they would tell you, 'This is our safety program,' and they'd be proud of that,” says Smith. “But we want to take them to the next level in the next few years [to say], 'This is just the way I do my job.' That it becomes part of their operating sense of what they do.”

Claim incidence per 100 full-time employees has dropped from 30-plus in 2009 to under 7.5.

One of the safety initiatives Iron Mountain is exploring is incentives for complying with safety audits and risk-reduction efforts. Instead of billing supervisors based on claims, Smith ponders, “what if we billed them back on some sort of behavioral aspects?” That way, “good behavior becomes incentivized, as opposed to simply billing people because they slipped up.”

Another cost-reducing measure in the works is a complete overhaul of the company's claims-reporting system. In the last 18 months, Iron Mountain streamlined its claims-reporting system by using Origami. Previously, field operators had to file its injury reports into STARS, its web-based reporting system, and file separate reports to the insurance company, OSHA and others. With Origami, the incident is only reported once.

Once an incident is entered into the system, Origami determines what kind of claims and forms need to be filled out. For example, if an automobile accident is entered, the system will recognize from the information entered that it needs to file a workers' comp claim and an auto liability claim, as well as notify the company's safety department and fill out an OSHA report. All that information is easily entered by the Origami system as it is connected to the workplace system.

“Then it follows up with the supervisor on preset process schedules to say, 'Have you put in this information?' 'Do you have this known yet?'” Smith explains. “So it's a smart system as well as just a data warehouse. I expect it to continue to help us drive down our costs.”

And costs have been on a downward trend since implementing all these changes—by more than half.

“If you took $18 million 2008 and brought it up to today's value, it'd probably be close to $20 million,” says Smith. Right now, Iron Mountain's costs are closer to $9 million—and are trending downward.

“I think the one thing that really has made our program successful has been the commitment and the willingness of senior management to listen and be involved and supportive of the claims effort and the safety effort of this company,” he continues. “I've been in risk management for 33 years, and there are a lot of companies that say a lot of things, but when it comes to actually putting their money, effort, and time into it, they can come up short.

“Iron Mountain accomplished what it did because we had executive management here that said, 'Yep, let's do this!' That's very tough to do when you can't get anyone's attention, but it sure is nice when you get it.”