By John Ratelle
Senior Vice President of Brokerage Management, Fit For Work
For employers today, insurance is and always has been a necessary expense that at times has low perceived value. Your business needs it to operate, and it is necessary to manage the inevitable workers’ compensation claims that will be filed over time.
And for many of these same employers, a comprehensive safety program is and always has been viewed as a discretionary expense – that is, one you can determine whether or not to invest in based on the perceived value to your business and how it fits into your own unique budget.
But what if a tailored turnkey safety program were accretive to your business success and just as important to managing both operational costs and insurance premium costs? And what if in leveraging both sides of this coin together, both employers and insurance carriers could experience safer workplaces, a healthier workforce, and a more profitable partnership for all involved at lower costs?
This is the reality Fit For Work brings to you with our risk prevention solutions. In pairing our injury prevention services with the resources of some of the nation’s largest insurance carriers, we are able to gain accurate insight into which risks are most present within a given workplace and, more importantly, which turnkey solutions can be leveraged to dramatically mitigate them – and both employers and insurance carriers can experience the benefits.
Here is a closer look at our unique approach to workers’ compensation risk management and the widespread advantages it has for all involved.
Improved Insight into Risks and Solutions
Incorporating insurance into the injury prevention process equips our team with a world of data and information previously disconnected from safety operations, such as that which is included in insurance programs and loss data. This enables us to more effectively identify opportunities to reduce risk and to measure success in terms of a return on your investment.
Now, you will have solid, verifiable data demonstrating reductions in loss/claims costs per dollar of payroll and reductions in claim frequency. We’ll bring together all the exposure data, payroll, claims data, employee counts by year by location and more to provide you with the analysis you deserve. Ultimately, you will have a verifiable return on investment before investing.
This also provides our team with the opportunity to dig into the data to analyze your primary cost drivers (e.g., musculoskeletal disorders, slip-and-falls, etc.). Once analyzed, we can then bring this information back to you and highlight the key areas of risk – and more importantly, how we plan to mitigate them through our turnkey prevention services.
Because we at Fit For Work are already interacting with your employees in their working environments, we are able to use this data to help diagnose the most effective approaches to improving safety and reducing workers’ comp claims.
Easier Justification of Spend and Quantification of ROI
In many cases, the Safety Manager or other operations professional within an organization will see value in investing in a comprehensive safety program, but they will struggle to effectively communicate that value to the C-suite decisionmakers.
This ultimately comes down to ROI. Before a CFO or Head of Risk Management, for example, can feel comfortable signing off on an enterprise-wide initiative, they need to know confidently that it will benefit the organization long-term. This is where having all that data at our fingertips from partnering with insurance providers can make a massive difference.
By gaining this insight into insurance data, we can help mid-level employees communicate empirically the value of a safety program with an onsite partner like Fit For Work – thus leading to buy-in from the top down and a safer working environment for everyone within the organization.
Increased Likelihood of Profitable Relationships
Joining injury prevention and insurance efforts means fewer injuries and associated costs for employers and fewer claims and lower premiums for carriers. In fact, much of the same data we gather to demonstrate the value of a safety program to employers is the same data we show to our carrier partners to highlight cost reductions reflective of the decrease in injury.
Narrowing and lowering the variability of loss and reducing the uncertainty charges in premiums benefits all involved. Underwriters can reduce premiums as a result of lower claims costs and a reduction in the volatility of those claims.
The bottom line is that this service plays a critical role in reducing risk, which increases the likelihood of the carrier having a profitable client.
Improved Ability to Find Great Clients
As an underwriter, you need to know why to choose one prospective client over another. And with so many variables at play, this can be a complex challenge for even the largest carriers.
When a business partners with Fit For Work, they receive a comprehensive safety strategy that makes them best-in-class and exceptional to work with from an insurance perspective. We do this by blending onsite early intervention, ergonomics, employee testing, and safety compliance – all under one roof and all in a way that is uniquely tailored to your organization and your employees.
Keep Your Employees Safe, Healthy, and Productive with Fit For Work
Safety in the workplace is an evolving, and can be viewed as an expense or a strategic advantage in developing a high-performance organization — and it’s now about so much more than instructional videos and first aid training. It’s about getting ahead of injuries before they happen by cultivating a proactive, results-driven safety program focused on preventing your employees from becoming patients.
Fit For Work achieves this by providing employers at thousands of locations across the country with strategic, consistent support to ensure their workers can experience a safer, happier, and more productive professional life. From onsite early intervention and ergonomics to safety compliance and employee testing, our services are designed to help safety managers and specialists prevent injuries while creating a more productive environment for their workers.
