Every company should strive to provide a safe work environment for their team. Employees who feel safe at work are generally happier and will perform better. An employee who feels they are in danger of injuring themselves every day will certainly be less productive.

As employers, you can provide proper personal protective equipment (PPE) and training. However, even if you are doing your best to provide a safe work environment, accidents can still happen. How you handle those workers’ compensation claims from the moment they happen can have a drastic impact on the reserve and ultimate payout of the claim.

Filing

When reporting incidents or claims, it is important to be consistent. Businesses should use a standard First Report of Injury document. All management-level employees should know how to complete this document, which records important information that may be relevant if the incident turns into a claim.

All incidents should be reported to the insurance carrier. If a company feels that an incident is minor and will not result in medical costs or lost wages, they can report the incident as a "notice only." This protects the business if a minor incident turns out to be more severe than expected and a claim has to be filed.

Employee reticence

Most employees who report a work-related injury are doing so for the first time and likely are unaware of what to do. Will there be consequences? Will the manager think less of them? Were they doing something they shouldn’t have been doing? These are some questions they may ask themselves.

When an employee first reports an injury to a manager, it is important for that manager to not scold or demean the employee. They should reassure the employee that they will get the care they need and that the injury will be reported to the workers’ comp carrier. If the manager scolds the employee, that employee may have negative feelings about the incident and not be in any hurry to get back to work.

Keep in touch

If an employee was seriously injured and will be out for an extended period, it’s important to follow up with them. Check in occasionally and see how they are doing. A call every couple of weeks will go a long way.

Getting a worker back to work is the main goal. This should not be a call to tell them they need to get back to work but rather just to ask how they are doing and maybe to offer help if they need anything. This lets the employee know that they are cared for and important to the business. Likely this will encourage the employee to want to come back to work.

Conversely, if the employee is out for 6 months and never hears from anyone or only hears from a manager asking when they will be back, it will likely have a negative impact on the employee’s attitude.

Engage ASAP

If your business is able, offering a light duty return to work program is extremely beneficial. This allows the employee to come back to work on a limited basis performing less strenuous tasks. It gets them out of their home and back around their teammates. The sooner you can get the employee back to work the better it will be for both the employee and the employer.

In the end, successfully managing a workers’ comp claim will not only ensure happy employees but can also keep their amount of time out of work to a minimum. This will help keep your experience modification factor down, which will ultimately save the company money.

What's an EMF?

Experience modification factor (EMF) or Experience Modification Rate (EMR) is a numerical rating that represents your actual workers’ compensation losses compared to industry class expected losses.

An EMF of 1.0 indicates that your business has losses consistent with the rest of your industry in your state. A factor below 1.0 means you are performing better than average. Above 1.0 means you are performing worse. This rating factor is extremely important because it is multiplied by your standard workers’ compensation premium. For example, if you pay $100,000 for your policy and you have a 1.3 EMF, your new premium would be $130,000.

Jared Perkoski is a risk advisor for FB Insure. Contact him at 508-695-1441 or jperkoski@fbinsure.com.