The results are as sweet as a Georgia peach. Among the county's achievements: Between 2011 and 2016, its workers' comp program annual net incurred losses decreased by more than two-thirds, from $1,034,331 in 2011 to $319,086 last year, according to data from MasterKey Connects, a risk management information system developed by Key Risk.

Getting under the hood

A graduate of the University of Georgia Risk Management and Insurance Program, Alford served three years in the Army on active duty with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C. He dedicated many more years of service to the Georgia National Guard while achieving the rank of major.

Alford's first private sector job was in Norcross, Ga., with Western Electric Co., where he did safety training; he then spent more than a decade overseeing safety operations in a Pabst Brewing Company bottling plant. After that he worked in an aircraft plant for Boeing Georgia before rounding out his time in manufacturing with the Atlas Ruby Corp., which makes roofing products. He retired in 2007.

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Boredom in retirement, combined with his background in safety and big-picture problem-solving, spurred Alford to join the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners in 2012. He quickly discovered that this suburb of about 240,000 residents and more than 1,500 full-time and part-time employees in roughly 30 different departments had surprisingly little in the way of a formal Risk Management Program.

Alford set out to get better acquainted with the county, including its 434 square miles, and its employees, who handle every manner of municipal task, from clerking to crime-fighting. Getting to know the broad workplace safety needs in Cherokee County, he relates, meant going from one department to the next, learning the responsibilities of each employee, and beginning the brick-by-brick process of building “a culture of safety.”

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Alford's loss prevention program includes monthly safety training topics. (Photo: iStock).

All departments on board

The county's risk management program began in earnest in 2013.

“Loss Prevention Programs are vital to any organization, but especially in the public sector due to the diverse risk exposures and services that are delivered to the public,” Alford explains. “Our Loss Prevention Program has been accepted by all departments, which contributes to the success of the program in controlling losses and claim costs to the County.”

Cherokee County's risk management umbrella now includes the following:

• A Safety Committee that meets regularly to review accidents and determines the appropriate corrective action.

• A periodic claim loss data review to decipher trends, disseminate loss run reports and set or reset each department's goals as needed.

• A reconceived Vehicle Accident Review Committee to survey county vehicle accidents, assign liability and make recommendations to prevent future crashes. A vehicle accident packet also is available on the county website.

• A Return to Work program that supports creative efforts to get employees who have been injured back to work as soon as possible.

• An overhaul of the county's workers' comp claim reporting process with new forms and instructions. That packet also lives online now to serve as a ready reference for employees and supervisors.

• Safety communications initiatives that include monthly safety tips and monthly safety training topics, which are emailed to employees and managers and posted on the county website to support regular jobsite safety meetings.

Taken together, these initiatives resulted in “very significant progress in reducing [the County's] experience modification factor,” from 2.24 in 2011 to 0.84 in 2016.

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A renewed focus on return-to-work

Alford is especially proud of the county's return-to-work initiative. “For some reason, there was a mindset with some employers that if an employee couldn't do all of the job, (he or she) shouldn't come back,” he says.

Alford knew, however, that the longer an injured employee remained out of work, the higher the chances that person would never return to work, which translated into a lifetime of workers' compensation benefits. Several return-to-work studies cite the same statistic: There is only a 50% chance that an injured employee will return to work after a six-month absence; this declines to a 25% chance following a one-year absence, and is further reduced to a 1% chance after a two-year absence.

“So we came up with some modified jobs,” Alford says. “Bringing people to work on light duty is something that really hadn't been done before.”

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Alford is especially proud of Cherokee County's return-to-work program. (Photo: iStock)

Consider the case of one county road worker who suffered a serious on-the-job injury after a piece of equipment smashed his foot so completely that toes needed to be amputated. “The doctor said he had a permanent restriction of only sedentary duty,” Alford recalls.

That man would not be headed back to his old job with the county roads department. “I had talked to the employee before,” says Alford. “He had eight or nine years of service, and he wanted to work.” So Alford gathered together the directors of several county departments along with the county manager, adjuster and broker, and began to look for solutions.

“One of the agencies said, 'Well, we've got a part-time position at the recycling center.'” That job primarily involved serving as a public liaison and overseeing community volunteers, who were the ones charged with most heavy lifting and materials sorting. “So I said, 'let's make this a full-time position.' Then I wrote up a job description, sent it to his authorized physician, and he approved it.”

Alford says the employee has since been “an outstanding worker who comes to work every day … so that was a win-win situation.”

But some benchmarks are revealed by circumstances, not statistics. “When I first came to Cherokee Country,” Alford says, “I used to get these calls from people saying, 'I had an employee get hurt. Now what do I do?' I don't get those calls anymore.”

Drilling down the risks

Cherokee County Assistant Fire Chief Eddie Robinson likens the staggering task of developing a countywide employee safety and risk management program to the dramatic way in which his own department grew over the last two decades.

“We have evolved from a fire service that was predominantly volunteer-run into a professional organization,” says Robinson, who started volunteering with the fire department in 1994. At that time, there were about 50 firefighters throughout all of Cherokee County. Today, thanks in part to a 1999 tax initiative to boost fire protection services, the county now has close to 400 firefighters.

Robinson says the risks these men and women face on the job these days go beyond burns or smoke inhalation. Consider that a top work-related concern for today's firefighters are the many cancers and respiratory illnesses linked to long-term exposure to burning carcinogens. “We are seeing cancer in the fire service at an alarming rate,” says Robinson, who recently marked two years in remission from leukemia.

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