Proof Positive That A Positive Safety Culture Will Dramatically Reduce Your Workers Compensation Costs

In previous blogs I mentioned the importance of implementing what we at CompEraser call “the 5-C’s:” COMMUNICATION, COMPASSION, CONSISTENCY, COMPLIANCE and CONTROL. When take as a whole the 5-C’s will instill an incredibly strong safety culture throughout your organization. Intuitively, it just makes sense that a culture conducive to health and safety would translate into better health and safety performance and workers compensation cost reduction.

Extensive new research from the consulting firm, Towers Perrin-ISR, has demonstrated new insights on the link between culture and performance. Specifically, their researchers zeroed in on four aspects of culture that influence outcomes: supervision, employee empowerment, teamwork, and workload. This study involved employee opinion data collected from more than 58,000 employees at 37 separate sites and compared with actual safety data gathered from the same 37 sites. Here is what they found.

Accident-related workday interruptions were higher at sites where respondents perceived higher workloads. In addition, employee perceptions of teamwork were also found to be related to this safety measure. Further, employee ratings of teamwork were actually found to moderate the impact of perceived workload on accident-related interruptions to the workday;

Under conditions of below average teamwork, greater workload was associated with a 62% higher rate of safety incidents. Under conditions of above average teamwork, even high workload sites experienced only moderate rates of safety incidents, suggesting that greater teamwork buffered the impact of high workload;

The study revealed a negative relationship between incidences of accident-related absences from work and employee empowerment. In general, the incidence of accident-related absence was almost 74% lower at sites where workers reported higher levels of empowerment;

The Towers Perrin-ISR analysis revealed a number of cultural factors that significantly correlated with documented rates of work-related injuries. Specifically, locations where employees were significantly more favorable about leadership (+7), teamwork (+7), customer focus (+4), quality (+4), job satisfaction (+7), supervision (+3), operating efficiency (+4), empowerment (+4) and innovation (+4) were also locations with less frequent work-related injuries.

In summary, sites with the greatest improvements in employee favorability on supervision, teamwork, empowerment, workload, senior management and employee well-being, had the greatest declines in safety incidents. The sites that made the cultural investment in the key areas coming out of the study experienced the greatest safety return on this investment.

CompEraser comes with on-line, on-demand resources needed to successfully implement the “5-C’s” throughout your organization and, as a result, dramatically reduce both insured and indirect workers compensation costs. Resources also include the formalization of your safety team, injury prevention, OSHA compliance, safety training, prompt injury response, workers compensation disability management, plus more. These resources are available 24/7 and used irrespective of which workers compensation carrier you select. Its patent-pending technology also provides unique financial reports for monitoring the effectiveness of your safety and health program on an on-going basis. For more information visit our website at www.CompEraser.com