Top 5 Take Away Points 2016 National Work Comp & Disability Conf – Part 1

Top 5 Take Away Points 2016 National Work Comp & Disability Conf – Part 1

Top 5 Take Away Points 2016 National Work Comp & Disability Conf – Part 2

Top 5 Take Away Points 2016 National Work Comp & Disability Conf – Part 3

Hello, Michael Stack here with Amaxx. So I just got back from New Orleans, Louisiana; I might be too much of a Northerner to pull off that pronunciation, but nevertheless it was a great time and very valuable time spent at the National Work Comp and Disability Conference last week.

It’s Not The Time Spent At The Conference, It’s What You Do With That Time

We spent a lot of time and we spent a lot of money to attend this conference. Very valuable networking, very valuable meetings, very valuable sessions, but it’s not about the time spent there, it’s about what you do with that time that was spent there, whether it’s follow-up appointments, whether it’s follow-up conversations, or whether it’s taking some of the information from the sessions and now implementing that in your program.

Take Away Point #1: Return To Work To Heal

So I want to talk to you about my top five take-away implementation points from the sessions that I attended. The first point then came from Marcos Iglesias, the medical director at The Hartford. He talked about this idea through his presentation. It was all about really this understanding of the culture of return to work in a program. He talked about return to work to heal, not heal to return to

work. So return to work to heal, not heal to return to work. That mindset, that methodology through the workforce, though the medical providers, and through the culture of a company, huge take-away point. Transfer now to the Teddy Award winning presentations.

Jennifer Massey from Harder Mechanical Contractors. She talked about this idea, and it was very much in the regards to this challenge that a lot of employers have to say, “Well, we don’t have any transitional duty. There’s nothing that we have available for our guys. We would return them to work but we just don’t have any jobs available.” So she took that job, and their company is very unique in that they’re very specialized, highly-skilled, union contractors. Some would say that’s an impossible scenario to deal with, but they’ve had 17 million hours without a lost time plan, very significant stat.

Here’s how they do it. They engage their workforce to work together to define and create meaningful transitional duty jobs. So if you look at their work force, very skilled labor, maybe they have a highly trained skill in Skill A. But maybe they also have a skill in Skill B or Skill C, and they can work together to engage their workforce, there’s a high level of trust, they have this idea embedded in their culture that return to work to heal for the benefit of the employee and the benefit of the company.

Both sides get it and both sides are engaged in this creative process to engage the workforce, understand what their skill set is, match them up with a need in the company that’s meaningful for the company and meaningful for the individual to now get that person returning to work so that they can heal. So very significant take-away point in really that mindset, and then action of how you do that in a program.

Continued…

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Author Michael Stack, Principal, COMPClub, Amaxx LLC. He is an expert in workers compensation cost containment systems and helps employers reduce their work comp costs by 20% to 50%. He works as a consultant to large and mid-market clients, is co-author of Your Ultimate Guide To Mastering Workers Comp Costs, a comprehensive step-by-step manual of cost containment strategies based on hands-on field experience, and is founder of COMPClub, an exclusive member training program on workers compensation cost containment best practices.

Contact: mstack@reduceyourworkerscomp.com.

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