Pssst! The secret to lowering workers’ comp premiums

The most impactful way to lower workers’ compensation costs, the secret ingredient if you will, is to prevent injuries in the first place. The Vigilant safety team spends all day everyday doing just that with hundreds of companies. We’ve learned 4 key things about preventing injuries:

1. Establish and maintain a culture of care.
   At its core, safety is about caring for and serving others well. When a company commits to preventing accidents, injuries, and illness, it improves the quality of life of its workers creating a ripple effect that carries into personal lives, communities and beyond. Injury prevention becomes sustainable when leadership commitment is shared by the entire organization. Being a safety leader does not require a title; it does require care, knowledge, courage, and dedication.
    
2. Regulatory compliance is just the beginning.
   Keeping workers safe is about more than knowing OSHA and WISHA codes and avoiding citations. While this is a good foundation, sustainable injury prevention is a commitment to accurately document, track, and analyze, injury and near-miss trends. This allows companies to not only understand when and where accidents happen, but also how to prevent them. Those who are the most successful at regulatory compliance either have a safety expert on staff or rely on a trusted safety partner to analyze injury data and help to focus prevention efforts.
    
3. Speaking of analyzing.
   It is important to use data analytics to understand what injuries occur most frequently and which are the most severe. Our memories and instincts about these injury trends are not always as accurate as we think—we tend to focus on the big things and the things that happened most recently. The next step is key. After gathering and analyzing this data, you must seek to identify the root causes that allow these injuries to occur. With this knowledge, you can target your prevention efforts in the most impactful direction.
    
4. Safety and productivity go hand-in-hand.
   It should come as no surprise to you that a safe workplace is also a more productive workplace, and vice versa. Unsafe workplaces can’t sustain high production output over time. Employees staying at work injury free leads not only to better production outcomes, but also positive employee morale. A safer workplace also equals fewer workers’ compensation claims and ultimately lower premium costs and higher retro refunds (for companies participating in such a program).

The Vigilant safety team puts these points into practice every day in serving our members. If you’re interested in hearing how we can do this for your company, please contact us.