As the CEO or leader of an organization you have the responsibility as the primary driver of your company’s culture. You are responsible for seeing future business opportunities, and potential risks and threats to your business and creating the greatest impact for your customers. In addition, you have the responsibility to lead your team toward your vision.
It is likely that one of your and your team’s business objectives is to reduce the number, cost and duration of employee injuries. Reducing the number prevents employees from getting hurt in the first place, reducing the cost prevents the claim from spiraling out of control unnecessarily and reducing the duration prevents employees from not recovering as expected from injuries.
Run away workers compensation costs can put pressure on your competitiveness, profitability and business opportunities. Also, work related injuries create stress, frustration and reduced productivity for your leadership and frontline employees.
As Paul O’Neal, CEO of Alcoa, said after he took over the job, “The only way to improve our company’s fortunes is to lower its cost and the only way to do that was with cooperation of our employees. The only way to get that was to show them we cared about them. And the way to do that was to establish as a first priority the elimination of all job related injuries.” In twelve years Paul O’Neal doubled Alcoa’s global market share.
We respect your need to secure a competitively priced Workers’ Compensation Insurance policy, which is a relatively easy task for insurance agents. The difficult challenges facing CEOs arising out of employee injuries are typically not addressed through the purchase of insurance.
Many CEOs assume these challenges have been addressed and improved by the insurance industry and marketplace. However, it is a complex system and problems persist.