Winning Strategies for Workers’ Compensation Risk Management

This session at WCI’s 2017 Workers’ Compensation Educational Conference highlighted program strategies from the three winners of National Underwriter P&C’s 2017 Excellence in Workers’ Compensation Risk Management Award.

Nations Roof LLC
Neftali Ortiz, Director of Risk Management
This roofing contractor has 22 offices throughout the U.S. and has grown by 61% in revenue in just four years. Yet, while the company has been growing rapidly, claims frequency has decreased by 25%. The company’s employees are exposed to extreme risks like fatal falls and heat illness. The secrets to their safety success was a shift in focus to safety training and getting 100% executive buy in. Their CEO is heavily engaged and Ortiz is in constant communication with him. Nations Roof hired two regional risk engineers and began utilizing third-party safety companies, which created accountability across the board. They conduct 1,000 safety inspections a year and enforce a behavior-based safety culture, embedding themselves in the field to get to know their employees, which has helped to get employees to adopt safety measures.

Butterball LLC
Brian Rodgers, Senior Director of Corporate Risk Management
This fully-integrated producer of turkey products employees 7,200 workers, with seven plant facilities, three hatcheries and four feed mills. They have a variety of serious risks. They have worked hard to create a culture of safety and their ultimate goal is to get employees to take ownership over their own personal safety, which they refer to as an ‘interdependent model’. This teaches each employee to not only look out for themselves, but for their colleagues as well. They were also able to make improvements by applying technology to manual processes like their live hang area, which was an area where many serious injuries were occurring. They invested $15 million dollars in this project. Ergonomic improvements improved dramatically as a result. When employees do get injured, they ‘lead with empathy’, which Rodgers believes is a large part of their workers’ compensation program success.

Cherokee County, Georgia
Robert Alford, Human Resources Manager
Just north of Atlanta, Cherokee County has grown into a densely-populated suburb with about 240,000 residents and more than 1,500 full-time and part-time employees in roughly 30 different departments. When Alford was hired, there was no formal safety program or strategy. He had to establish an overall program, forming a safety committee and put together a claims management program with a return-to-work program. This program utilizes light duty or modified duty jobs to get employees back to work quicker. They also introduced an injury report program that instructed employees the exact steps to take when an injury or motor vehicle accident occurred. They ramped up safety training, briefing employees on different scenarios and the hazards that could occur during each of them.