Working smarter and safer
NUP&C’s Workers’ Comp Award for Excellence in Risk Management highlights dedication on the part of workers’ comp professionals.
I’ve been writing about workplace safety for a long time. At a former job, I managed a newsletter on safety for front-line supervisors and a safety reference manual for healthcare facilities, writing about the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) rules and regulations. I’ve also written safety training materials and videos (lockout/tagout and bloodborne pathogens, among others).
One of my colleagues at that company was creating a video on working in confined spaces, and she wanted to use the opening scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” You know, the one in which Harrison Ford is being chased through a cave by a large boulder, rolling faster and faster. But the writer had to ask Ford to waive his star fee and only accept union scale for us to be able to afford to produce the video. Ford, who made his living as a carpenter before achieving success as an actor, readily agreed, noting that strict safety measures kept him and his stunt doubles from sustaining injuries in filming, as they had while he was building houses.
That same unwavering commitment to safety is what makes the difference between a good workers’ compensation risk management program and a great one. The three winners of the 2019 NU Property & Casualty Workers’ Comp Award for Excellence in Risk Management have demonstrated their commitment to keeping employees safe on the job in innovative ways despite challenges in their industries.
DHL Express has workers in a variety of physically demanding roles including employees who load and unload delivery trucks, drivers who make deliveries, and maintenance crews who keep the trucks on the road.
Northwell Health’s employees include medical professionals at all levels, starting with the employees who transport patients in wheelchairs or on gurneys, to the skilled nursing staff, on up to the neurosurgeons responsible for complicated surgeries that may take hours.
Starbucks employees from the baristas who make your handcrafted coffee drinks to the cleaning crew, face such risks as slips and falls, burns from hot liquids, and back strains from lifting heavy packages of coffee beans.
All three have found ways to reexamine the jobs their employees do and come up with techniques for working smarter. As a result, they’ve cut their workers’ comp medical costs substantially and improved return-to-work times. But even more significant, they’ve achieved buy-in that safety is critical from all stakeholders across the company.
Over the five years that I’ve been involved with NUP&C’s Workers’ Comp Award for Excellence in Risk Management, I’ve seen the dedication on the part of the workers’ comp professionals who nominate their programs. All are truly evangelists for their cause, and they spend a lot of time encouraging everyone from the C-suite on down to the lowest paid employee to contribute ideas to the program. These ideas don’t have to be overly complex or require a large investment. In Starbucks’ case, one improvement was as simple as direct deposit of benefit payments instead of paper checks.
As you read the stories of this year’s winners, think about what they’re doing differently and what you can adopt in your workplace. If their stories have inspired you to make changes, I’d like to hear about them — big or small.
Keep track of those changes, and let us know about them when we open nominations for the 2020 awards. It could be your company we’re reading about in these pages.
And that’s what is top of mind for me this month.
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