Six key steps to keep employees safe and reduce costs

Our experts at BrickStreet have developed a Roadmap to Safety Success program to help your workers’ compensation policyholders keep their employees safe and reduce costs.

The roadmap consists of six key steps to aid employers in developing, implementing and managing a culture of workplace safety that reduces the severity, cost and duration of claims.

These steps include:

1. Management commitment: Visibility and active participation from management are the foundation for accomplishing safety goals.
2. Accountability: Supervisors and employees must be held accountable. Safety must not only be a priority, but a company value.
3. Risk recognition: Employees and employers must identify potential hazards and establish controls to help mitigate risks.
4. Hiring practices: Employers need to properly train and educate personnel about the physical demands of the job, as well as safety and health expectations.
5. Hierarchy of controls: Existing controls for adequacy should be evaluated and updated as needed.
6. Measuring results: It’s important to measure the effectiveness of safety protocols and to measure the right things. Measuring lagging indicators like incident rates or number of claims is better than measuring nothing at all, but these only give information about injuries after they occur. Measuring leading indicators, such as inspection/audit results, training, orientation and attitudes/behaviors, is a more proactive way to manage safety.

The Roadmap to Safety Success is available here as a flyer.