Injury-Proof Your Business

INJURY-PROOF YOUR BUSINESS

6 principles for an effective injury prevention program

At distribution company Metcash, the rate of strain and sprain musculoskeletal disorders was high and trending upwards. And yet within 12 months, the number of Lost Time Injuries had reduced by 79%. At the same time, wage costs reduced by over $100,000 and WorkCover premiums by a projected total of $557,634. In just one year. How had so many injuries suddenly been prevented?

Musculoskeletal injuries are at epidemic proportions throughout the workforce and have become a costly burden for the economy. It’s estimated that the cost of workplace injuries on a business’ bottom line due to loss of productivity and treatment costs is as much as $60 billion1.

The impact of this on your business is huge – claims costs, productivity drain, WorkCover premiums. The list goes on.

The trend in the market place is that injury costs keep growing, despite health and safety initiatives, despite injury management being everyone’s focus.

Faced with this, we assume that injuries are inevitable.

That business always comes with risk.

That doing the best for our workers means simply managing their claims as best we can.

But what about instead of simply managing injuries, you could actually prevent them?

[1] Safe Work Australia’s Key Work Health and Safety Statistics, Australia, 2014

COST OF WORKPLACE INJURIES

$60 billion

By implementing a more proactive injury prevention system your business could experience:

• A significant reduction in Lost Time Injuries (LTIs) and Medical Treatment Injuries {MTIs)

• Reduced time lost offsite

• A drop in WorkCover premiums

• Fitter, more engaged workers

• Improved productivity

• Lower levels of absenteeism and presenteeism

• Less staff turnover

• Improved industrial relations

• Fewer treatments per injury

• A significant reduction in claims costs

Healthy workers are healthy business

1.Top down, safety up

2.Ge t your business fit right

THE 6 PRINCIPLES

3.Mak e well worthwhile

4 .Br eak down barriers to treatment

5.Keep the lines of communication open

6.Se t up your pit crew

1. TOP DOWN, SAFETY UP

Make your safety program a key part of your company culture by actively committing to it at all levels of leadership.

Although physical health correlates with financial health, workers won’t automatically buy into a program that’s just seen as saving the company money. But when they see their CEO taking time for an exercise break, or that a wellness target is included in their manager’s job assessment, they begin to see that safety is more than just the posters on the wall.

Good habits, especially when encouraged from the top down, can help embed new procedures and processes, as well as encourage innovation throughout the business.

Give middle managers and team leaders all the way down the chain the tools to support employees’ wellness efforts. Create opportunities for cross-team connections, whether by providing prompts at a weekly team meeting, encouraging daily site walk throughs or even a casual BBQ to break down barriers.

2. GET YOUR BUSINESS FIT RIGHT

Start by identifying the specific needs of your staff and business. Make sure any program you implement takes a broad approach to your business, allowing everything from pre-hire to fitness programs and more. It can help to imagine barriers to injury like slices of Swiss cheese. When holes align, an accident can occur. But stack up enough slices, and you can prevent incidents from happening. Examine workplace situations on an ongoing basis, so that you can make your business safer by plugging holes or adding new barriers.

Consider where the majority of injuries are occurring. Almost 80% of reported workplace injuries are musculoskeletal, caused by things like overuse, strain and muscle loading2. The most common reason for these is due to a manual handling associated incident3, so it can pay to make regular manual handling training the cornerstone of your injury prevention program.

Then consider what additional training or support specific roles require; think stretching programs for drivers, or ergonomic assessments for more desk-bound workers.

Look at any existing programs and evaluate their effectiveness. These might include flu vaccinations, ergonomic assessments or bike-to-work initiatives. Those that are popular and/effective should be consolidated under a single banner to provide consistency and substance to your injury-proof program.

Accept that change may sometimes take time. As an example, construction giant Grocon took two years to achieve shifts in their injury prevention activity and workplace culture, but in that time they reduced MTIs and LTIs from 24 per month to just two, the average number of treatments per injury from 14.8 to six, and they saved a potential $478,281 in premium increases – changes that are worth persevering for.

[2] Key Work Health and Safety Statistics, Australia, 2014

[3] Bodycare 2014 www.bodycare.com.au

A risk assessment will help identify barriers to put in place and gaps that can be filled with ongoing training and education as part of your injury-proof program.

3. MAKE WELL WORTHWHILE

Make it good, make it relevant – and make it comfortable. Staff are unlikely to waste their time with uncoordinated or half-hearted efforts, so if budgets are tight, focus on doing a smaller number of initiatives well.

Workers will also be reluctant to address personal health issues such as health or fitness screening with managers without the proper context. An independent provider can provide a comfortable amount of distance while still providing a consistent service.

Workers also need to clearly see the benefits of injury prevention programs to themselves. This means making use of carrots not sticks to encourage the right behaviour, rather than risking resentment by mandating compliance.

Give them something to be proud about. Celebrate not only the wins (like a milestone number of days with no LTIs) but the individual processes that work towards the goal. This allows you to give credit to the people and actions that are making the most difference along the way.

Safety begins with fitness for work

so consider preassessment screenings for new hires so you can be sure you’re hiring someone who’s physically suitable for the role.

4. BREAK DOWN

BARRIERS TO TREATMENT

Make the program easily accessible to workers. True onsite integration encourages higher participation rates (in the case of wellness programs) and can also reduce the time taken to report claims and seek treatment. And speed to treatment is important, both in terms of recovery - and cost. Where an appropriate treatment is provided from the onset of injury, the average number of treatments required to discharge an injured worker is 4.2 over 10 days4. This is a significantly better outcome when compared to an injured employee with an open workers compensation claim who takes over 6 weeks and an average of 14.3 treatments.5

While a relationship with a local doctor or physio can work well, access to an onsite physio can offer a greater level of convenience, encouraging even minor niggles to be treated immediately. This is important, because if minor injuries and aches aren’t managed early, they can quickly spiral out to significant injuries resulting in expensive claims.

The likelihood of an injured employee returning to work after being off work due to sickness or injury after 20 days is 70%.

But this reduces to 50% once an injured employee has been off work for 45 days, and a staggering 35% after just 70 days.7

[7] The 2013 WorkSafe Annual Report

5. KEEP THE LINES OF COMMUNICATION OPEN

It’s inevitable that the introduction of new safety requirements will meet some level of resistance.

Start to get people involved by thinking carefully about how to make the story engaging, and delivering it in a creative manner can go a long way in getting buy in.

Give workers the space to ask questions and get used to the idea. Let them observe how tasks should be done and come to agreement about how they will do the work every single day.

Once you set the agenda, stick to it. If you really want staff to believe you, keep communicating a consistent message so they know that priorities won’t be constantly changing.

Investigate how you could make it easier for workers to report concerns, and ask them to provide input. This might be through focus groups, a suggestion box - or even a hotline to the CEO.

This is exactly what Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa did following a serious workplace accident, with a surprising effect. "Workers started calling, but they didn't want to talk about accidents," O'Neill told me. "They wanted to talk about all these other great ideas."

Establishing chains of communication up through the business can allow not only safety concerns to be addressed, but other business improvements to be identified offering additional productivity and profitability benefits.

Make sure you keep in touch if they do get injured to monitor their health, and look for ways to encourage a gentle and progressive return to work.

By getting people to practice good ideas and to learn from every instance of anything going wrong, the process will get better and better.

6. SET UP YOUR PIT CREW

‘Injury-proof’ is admittedly a simple term for a intricate model, the sort of complexity that requires active partnerships both internally and externally in order to achieve success.

Internal partnerships allow better intra-team coordination and collaboration, while also providing much needed credibility. External providers can bring specialist knowledge and support to the business while not requiring any additional internal resource.

Focus on a consistent approach across the team. Adopting a standardised approach to surgery safety has been key to the World Health Organisation’s recent success in reducing complications and deaths8, and has similar benefits when applied to workplace safety.

Setting and achieving consistency across worksites through tools like job dictionaries, uniform task analysis and training, and injury rate reporting allows for early intervention across multiple sites that may be thousands of kilometres apart.

Following the implementation of an onsite service that included an early intervention program, task specific manual handling training and functional pre employment screening assessments, Fuchs Lubricants saw a dramatic reduction in lost time injuries, and WorkCover claims dropped by almost 80%, representing a cost saving to the business of over $460,000.

And just as importantly, the company noticed a marked improvement in workers’ attitudes towards health and injury, communication between concerned parties, and accuracy in reporting injury causes.

[8] World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist and Implementation Manual

People do get hurt and injuries can happen. But most workplace injuries ARE preventable and being proactive is the answer.

Put simply, healthy workers make a healthy business. Injury-proof your business with Bodycare.

Our Proactive Injury Prevention System is tried and tested.

We work across two countries, partner with more than 110 companies, are supported by more than 70 clinics, work with more than 150 health professionals, consult to more than 130 sites, manage more than 50,000 employees per year, treat more than 75,000 injuries and attend more than 300,000 appointments per year.

For a confidential discussion about your workplace, please contact us.

Bodycare Workplace Solutions

Level 1, 48 Cecil Street Southbank VIC 3207 1300 222 639

info@bodycare.com.au

www.bodycare.com.au