Loss Control Strategies

You may think you know your company pretty well. You have your thumb on every aspect of daily operations and you know what your employees are going to do before they do it. Everything is intricately plotted and planned for, and no surprises lurk around the corners. Or do they?

No matter how connected you feel to the departmental extremities of your company, you do not have the ability to predict the future.

Plans fail. Employees screw-up. And sometimes, yes, accidents do happen. And accidents will cost you. Though you may not be able to prevent workers’ compensation accidents, you can certainly take steps to hedge your bets and reduce the potential for disaster, thus positively affecting your bottom line.

TAPPING RESOURCES. In many cases, a company might have resources at its fingertips that it doesn’t even know about. For this reason, it’s important to check with your insurance company to see if they have any programs or ideas that might save you money down the road.

"We’re taking advantage of having the insurance companies come in here to do videos and classes," explained Pat Heroman, the president of Heroman Services Plant Co. in Baton Rouge, La. "When we were smaller, we didn’t realize we were paying for these services. We’re taking advantage of them now."

But as Mike Davidson, chief financial officer of Gardeners’ Guild, San Rafael, Calif., pointed out, not all insurance providers are created equal.

"We’ve had workers’ compensation carriers who say they provide a lot of training and expertise," Davidson explained. "Yet they don’t bring it to the table. Now we try to make sure that we have a loss control representative that we can count on to really be active."

Davidson said that his current representative has come in to talk about investigation training with his management team. Davidson defines investigation training as: "learning what questions you should be asking when an accident occurs."

In some cases, the right representative might even go out into the field to view your employees at work. Davidson’s representative does, and he finds the input invaluable.

"He’ll come back and say, ‘I was at a job site from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and here’s what I saw,’" Davidson explained.

According to Davidson, letting employees know that they may be observed on the job is a good idea.

"A lot of times we’ll tell them, ‘Hey, our loss control person is going to be out and about today so if you see someone looking at you, that’s what it’s about,’" Davidson said.

According to Davidson, sometimes resources that help companies teach on-the-job safety can be found around the community.

"One example is the local fire department," he said. "They came out and started a gas fire in the yard in a pan and each employee was able to come up and put it out. Before that, maybe one out of 100 of us had ever used a fire extinguisher."

Davidson related that his company even brought in a trainer from a local gym to teach employees how to prevent back injury while working on the job.

"Generally, when we renew our workers’ compensation, the first thing we do is sit down and schedule four quarterly meetings just to go over every loss in detail and look at what we’re doing internally for control," Davidson explained. "We want to get down to the core issue of what occurred and try to change behavior so that it doesn’t happen again. The main strategy here is utilizing the resources available to you."

DRUG TESTING. Drug testing might be a useful tool for any landscape contractor looking to cut-down on the expenses that spring from on-the-job accidents.

Often an employer might fear making drug-testing a normal part of company practice, thinking it could reflect a lack of trust on the part of the employer, which might lead to bad working relationships. Randy Cooper, co-owner of PLANTation Services, Little Rock, Ark., said you can make drug testing a reasonable policy that could protect you from unnecessary accidents.

"If a company of any size has not gone through the formality of getting a good drug and alcohol testing policy, they are making a mistake," Cooper asserted. Cooper recommended testing in the event of any accident. Post-accident testing, as a policy, can seem less obtrusive in many ways to the employee while still preventing the costs that random drug testing would be used to prevent.

"Its amazing how many times we’ve had a small injury and during testing that person tests positive for something in their system," Cooper said.

If you do decide to implement a similar policy, your best bet would be having it drawn up by your lawyer for assurance that your policy is both fair and without the legal loopholes that can sometimes reverse the effects of such a well-meaning policy.

TIGHT SECURITY. Some companies have found that one way to prevent unnecessary loss is with the aid of tighter security.

"I recently had some theft going on," Heroman said. "So we installed additional security for our facility.

"In the past, if a motion detector went off in the middle of the night, the cops couldn’t do anything – the person is gone by the time they arrive," Heroman said. "Now we go back and the minute the motion detector is kicked off we’re looking at about a five-minute span on videotape."

According to Heroman, not only did theft come to an abrupt halt after installing the sytsem, but other unforeseen benefits began to take shape. When you are watching employees carefully, they may watch themselves even more carefully. And if you have cameras to do the job when you cannot, employees will most likely make sure that you are only ever catching their "best side."

FUN AND GAMES. There is a lighter side of loss-prevention that doesn’t concern strict security, yet encourages employees to feel good about being safe by rewarding them when accidents are not occurring.

"We are an employee-owned company, and by nature we tend to be real open with our information," Davidson said. "We decided to take the same approach with safety.

"We did some research and put together a program that would reward both the individual and the team," Davidson pointed out. "We wanted to keep the program serious in nature but also make a game out of it. In the first year, we went from about 30 separate incidents to about 10 that were minor in nature. Whether the two are completely related to one another is hard to say, but the program did heighten safety awareness.

Davidson explained the game: "Monthly, if you had zero incidents your team is eligible for a drawing. For every safety-related incident the company has, the drawing pool would be reduced from $50 per person down to $40, to $30, to $20 until perhaps there is no drawing if there was a particularly bad month. The main component of the game is a visible scorecard that shows what type of incidents we are having. By keeping score, posting the information and rewarding those who did well, we have a fun thing to do at every safety meeting."

Visible scoring also gives employees something to talk about at company meetings, according to Davidson.

"Visible scoring gives us the opportunity to say, ‘Here’s where we are at this month. Keep up the good work,’" Davidson explained. "When incidents do occur, we investigate them thoroughly and then whenever possible we try to get the person that had the incident to talk about his or her experience with the entire company. If he or she is not open to doing that, we will talk about the incident without naming names so we can learn from every incident."