Workers’ compensation is more than a legal requirement for conducting business. It’s crucial to protect your business and its employees simultaneously. However, if your business deals with many injuries, workers’ compensation expenses can start eating up your budget more than you want. Fortunately, there are many legal ways that your business can be proactive about managing workers’ compensation issues and costs, and this will help protect both a business and its employees.
1. Integrate Safety in Your Company Culture
Paying out workers’ compensation claims might be inevitable, but you can manage the odds about how frequently or serious the claims are. Keeping employees safe can prevent many injuries and the claims that come with them. Develop an effective safety culture for your company and maintain it consistently. Identify proactive programs you can implement internally, break them down into simple steps, and then start rolling them out individually to reset safety expectations gradually over time until everyone is on the same page.
2. Research Your Hires
One very effective way to manage workers’ compensation issues is to be very mindful of who you bring into your organization. You need to bring talent in who has the skills your company needs, and you want professionals who fit your company’s values and culture well. However, if you can dig deeper into each candidate, you can find individuals with the safety culture values you want among your workforce. Ensure your job descriptions convey what you’re looking for, and investigate their prior work references. Drug testing, motor vehicle reports, and criminal background checks are crucial to your onboarding process.
3. Properly Classify Employees
There’s a lot of technical jargon involved with safety management, and there are classification codes for both specific industries and the particular labor roles in each industry. At least once a year, have someone audit your company’s employee classification codes to verify accuracy. You may discover that employees who have changed roles internally might need reclassification to cheaper codes that lower your workers’ compensation insurance premiums.
4. Thorough Employee Training
There are many ways to be proactive about workers’ compensation management in your business, but one of the best is to provide your employees with thorough training. This is particularly true for your newest employees because they’re three times as likely to lose time to injuries in their first month than after spending a year on the job. Proper training and communication mitigate these risks and prevent costly errors. Train your new employees on proper procedures that suit your workplace so they know what to do if an injury happens.
Proactivity Pays Off
Running your business involves dealing with many different things simultaneously, and managing claims is one of them. Proactive management of these cases reduces costs and downtime while improving recovery time. Implement an effective return-to-work program to improve morale and working experiences among your professionals to retain them in a tight labor market better. For a truly comprehensive approach to this, make sure your business has reputable workers’ compensation attorneys available when you need them.
