Launching a Workers Compensation Management Communications Plan
Your workers’ compensation policy is drafted, you have stated your workers’ comp management problems and solutions and ultimate goals. But, you’re not done yet.
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Now you require concrete communication instruments to bring your employee population into the fold. Your mantra becomes COMMUNICATE!
You must communicate to attain your work comp goals. The best time to design and launch a communications plan is just before the company’s annual budget review. At budget review policy goals are being updated and now is the time to determine the financial resources needed to put the plan into action.
Refine the goals set out in your policy, to ensure they are measurable, observable goals. Characterize your target audience(s) and identify the kinds of communication tools best fitting those audiences. Keep an eye on budgetary concerns and begin to plot a timetable for actual implementation.
If your plan is being developed outside the annual fiscal calendar, you can call it an interim plan, and design it to flow into the annual review.
5 Basic Communication Steps
1. Obtain Management Commitment
Show management how putting a workers’ compensation management policy into practice reduces the costs of work comp and effects the company’s bottom line. Include the dollar figure you need for resources and how you expect to allocate dollars to those resources, i.e., what the resources are and how much they will cost. Keep in mind, management is not interested in the “touchy/feely” aspects of a program well planned and executed. They are, however, VERY interested in reducing costs and saving money. Do everything you can to influence them to give the green light to your WCM program.
2. Refining Your Workers’ Compensation Management Goals
A WCM communications plan helps to identify, classify and sequence the steps to take to get the workers’ comp management message out: safety and workers’ comp management are top management priorities; full participation by the employee is expected and required; specific procedures going to be put into place: a post-injury-response procedure and a return-to-work modified duty program.
The plan takes the goal statements to the next level and identifies how these goals are achieved. Thus, there must be measurable benchmarks about how we expect to see the goals are met.
These are examples of measurable benchmarks. Telling how things get done.
Our return to work ratio will increase from 10% of employees returning to work after 1-4 days of a work related injury to 90% of employees returning to work in the same time frame.
We will establish a return-to-work program where employees will, where state law permits it, take a form to their treating physician to be faxed back to the employer within 24 hours after visits. The form will contain the diagnoses and work restrictions so t a modified duty position can be immediately identified and customized.
A modified duty job bank will be established and each unit is required to submit job descriptions for each position within the unit. Job descriptions will be excerpted and re-written into modified duty job descriptive shells. The shells can be completed based on each injured employee’s diagnosis and specific individual work restrictions, but the modified duty job descriptions remain in a bank to be reviewed every six months or at annual review.
3. Identify your audience.
Who are the recipients of the communication plan? Begin by listing characteristics – i.e., median educational/reading levels, dominant language, the extent to which they are exposed to potentially hazardous work conditions.
If you are multi-sited, map your audiences by site, because you will implemented the plan accordingly; by the above characteristics on a per-site basis.
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4. Map your strategy
Your communication plan goals may be the same goals for each facility, but differ quite a bit because your audiences are different, so you need to map these differences in the design of the plan. Let’s say, your company has three sites: primarily manufacturing, a service industry, office workers’ and sales staff. These three sites represent three vastly different audiences and you may have to run the three branches concurrently to met communication needs.Therefore, identify:
Areas of overlap to avoid duplication of effort.
Activities and tools you can use concurrently to reach the largest audience as simply as possible.
Internal and external communication strategies. For example, given these three type of sites, internal strategies may include getting site managers to comply with new return-to- work goals and to identify modified duty jobs. You can consider chargeback and small bonuses.
Your external audience includes beneficiaries of the workers’ comp management program, namely the employees. Here you must timeline the workers’ comp management communication program, identify tools dovetailing with audience differences, and identifyas many areas of overlap as possible.
5. Select your tools
Because workers’ comp management tools are plentiful, identify and use those tools giving the most bang for your buck.
A universal tool used all employees is a laminated lanyard card containing post injury response procedures. Most employees wear badges and they can wear the post injury response card right behind the identification badge. A wallet card for post injury response procedures is also useful.
Keep language at a sixth grade reading level. Include contact information, and employee/supervisor/witness responsibilities.
Do not just hand employees the lanyard card and expect them to read it. Plan a toolbox meeting for the manufacturing site, breakout meetings for the service site, and a webinar for traveling employees to in-service them on the post injury response requirements so employees cannot claim they didn’t know what to do in the event of a workplace injury. (workersxzcompxzkit)
Other communication tools can include an employee brochure, newsletters, signage, quarterly/annual progress reports, website, blogs, contests, and the like.
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: Robert_Elliott@ReduceYourWorkersComp.com or 860-553-6604.
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