Workers’ Compensation Performance Measurement

For the last decade, injury frequency has been trending steadily lower. There are a number of reasons for this: automation, loss of manufacturing jobs, better safety engineering, etc. Injury severity, however, has not followed suit despite technological gains in claim administration and medical management and an ever so slow move to the use of predictive analytics.

This creates challenges for employers, especially of the small and middle market variety, and, to a certain degree, even for a few national, enterprise accounts who find themselves pretty much where they were ten years ago in terms of style and policy with respect to workers’ compensation. One reason for this is the deep rooted legacy mentality and resistance to change of many insurers and Third Party Administrators. In many ways, these organizations remind me of flies circling around a light in a lampshade, mistaking movement for progress.

However, employers still foot the bill and are still in command. Keeping in mind that the workplace is the best place to control workers’ compensation costs, employers still need to build and maintain solid programs to prevent and contain loss. Case in point is Bob Oberosler, Vice President of Loss Prevention for Rite Aid, a national pharmacy chain. At the New Jersey Self Insurers Association’s Annual Meeting a couple of weeks ago, he described his company’s work to craft a forward thinking loss prevention and workers’ compensation management program and communicate it to employees who are far and wide, indeed. But before that could happen, Mr. Oberosler said, he faced an even more daunting task – getting management’s commitment and buy-in to the effort. The good news is this happened and Rite Aid has been enjoying some spectacular results because of it.

This got me thinking. In order to sustain C-Suite commitment, a risk manager, or Loss Prevention VP, such as Bob Oberosler, needs to provide the Leadership team a steady, easily understandable Performance Measurement Results Dashboard. So, what should be the characteristics of such a Dashboard?

Performance measurement should have four characteristics: It should be simple, it should be meaningful, it should be consistent and it should be continuous.

By simple, I mean easily and quickly understood by senior management. Meaningful means that it should sit in senior management’s sweet spot; it should be something that is anticipated and valued by leaders. It should be consistent, because those leaders, once trained to view performance in one way, do not appreciate abrupt course changes. And to be effective over the long term, it has to be a continuous and routine process. The mantra should be: What is consistently well-measured is highly valued.

With this framework in mind, I usually recommend that monthly or quarterly reports to senior management measure two things religiously: Incurred losses per full time equivalent employee (and this should be done by department, division and company) and incurred losses per every hundred dollars of payroll (again, split out by department, division and company). Before any measurement occurs, however, management should settle on targets, which should be a bit of a stretch, but attainable. And target selections should be set against actual performance in the prior three or four years. For instance, if costs per FTE have been in the $200 to $300 range in the last few years, a good target would be a reduction of 30% to 40% in the current year.

Senior managers have finite attention spans. Therefore, workers’ compensation performance measurement should fit on one page, a Scorecard that senior management can assimilate in no more than a few minutes. If the information is pithy enough, that’s as long as it should take, but it should also lead to fruitful discussion about management actions to enhance performance, discussion that comes out of knowledge.

There are many other solid and valuable workers’ compensation metrics, but, in Lynch Ryan’s experience, these two are the ones that senior managers appreciate the most.

All of this assumes, of course, that, as at Rite Aid, a serious and ongoing safety, workers’ compensation and injury management program is humming along and that all parts of the organization have been trained in how to keep it that way.

Workers’ Compensation Performance Measurement

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