Scoring Your Workers Comp Management Practices What Is the Goal

What Is the Goal?
Successful work comp administrators know the GOAL is to reduce costs of the company’s workers’ compensation program while still taking good care of workers injured in the workplace. The rationale for this is that the financial impact of workers’ comp can be financially devastating for a company. If your company has a large deductible all the losses are within your deductible which means that your company pays directly. If you are in a guaranteed cost program, your experience rating will decline and premiums will increase as your experience “mod” goes up. And, in some cases, if your mod is over 1. you won’t even be able to bid on business in some industries, in some states. Using a metric that measures operational practices is crucial. One such metric is the National Workers’ Compensation Management Score (NWCMS). For the first time, the 2009 RIMS Benchmark Survey measures operational best practices offering a look at which best practices companies use most and least. This is a noteworthy development.

If your company has this workers’ comp score, you can stop reading! You’ve reached your perfect goal.

However, if your company is like most, you will not score a perfect 100+.
More likely your score will look something like this:

So, WHAT does it all mean?

After answering 88 questions, you’ll receive a measure of where your company stands in reducing with its workers’ comp program costs and receive recommendations for improvement. That’s it – 88 questions covering 10 key work comp areas.

You will discover you are doing better in some areas and poorly in others. The List of Score Rankings tells you where you stand. The Assessment results tell you what you have to do to IMPROVE! And, with improvement comes a higher Workers’ Comp Score.

As we like to say, “If you don’t know what you don’t know.” then you are going nowhere except your COSTS will be going up, up, up! Since workers’ comp costs are not part of the stock market, they need to go down, down, down.

List of Score Rankings

Score 1-28 Welcome aboard! Your score indicates you are just getting started and are new to workers’ comp cost containment. Don’t be discouraged or try to “fix” everything at once. Go step by step. You may put 1-4 Recommendations on your “to do” Timetable.

Score 29-60 Let’s get started! Your workers’ comp cost containment program is started and you are ready to build by implementing some new procedures and practices. Prioritized the 4-7 recommendations on your Timetable.

Score 61-82 Push a little harder! You are in pretty good shape! But, now is not the time to let down. Fine-tune your program to build a solid, effective program. Prioritize the recommendations and put as many as you think you can handle on the Timetable.

Score 83-100+ Great Job! Your company has an excellent program and may only need a little tweak here and there to make it a Best-In-Class. Because you have so few recommendations, put them ALL on your Timetable and start “tweaking.”

Author Robert Elliott, executive vice president, Amaxx Risks Solutions, Inc. has worked successfully for 20 years with many industries to reduce Workers’ Compensation costs, including airlines, health care, manufacturing, printing/publishing, pharmaceuticals, retail, hospitality and manufacturing. He can be contacted at: [email protected] or 860-786-8286.