3 Techniques To Gain Workers’ Comp Management Commitment

If senior management is not backing your work comp program reform project, you will not be successful. Hello, my name is Michael Stack. I’m the CEO of Amaxx. And that fact of senior management is not backing. You will not be successful. It’s a hundred percent true, or at least as successful as you could, you’ll be kind of running up a mountain or you’re going to be kind of slugging through the mud, trying to get some improvements without senior management approval. It’s going to be very difficult. Now I will caveat that with that very rarely are you going to have a hundred percent backing by your senior managers? So don’t use that as an excuse to do nothing. Don’t use that as an excuse to do nothing. A lot of times, if you don’t have a hundred percent approval, maybe you can get 20% approval. Maybe you say, let’s do a pilot, let’s start this little project.

Talk In Their Language

Let’s kind of test this and see how it goes. And then you build momentum from there. That’s how you oftentimes will end up doing that. But how do you get even that first 20% of approval in order to start that pilot, I’m going to give you some tips here in this video, as far as how to build, manage commitment and give three little tips for you. Three-part process here in order to different tactics, different techniques, different ways to start thinking, okay, I’m going to get that little first approval in order to get this pilot. First one is talk in their language. Talk in the language of your senior manager of your boss. What is important to them? What is important to them? Look particularly at the financial metrics that are important to them. So let’s say your organization or your senior manager is really big on the EBITDA number earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, and amortization earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, amortization, let’s say that they’re hot ticket number.

That’s the one that they always look at. That’s the one that they’re reporting on. That’s the one that they were tracking on. Maybe this is true for your organization. Maybe it’s not, but you got to find this out. If that’s what it is, you need to make note of that. That’s the language that they speak. Maybe they speak in just in net income. Maybe that’s their hot ticket number. Maybe it’s revenue from operations, you know, whatever the hot ticket number is for that particular senior manager talk in their language, understand what’s important to them.

Quantify WC Costs In Their Financial Metric

Once you understand what’s important to them, quantify workers’ comp in that language, figure out what it means from a financial standpoint, how does workers’ compensation impact EBITDA? How does it impact net income? How does it impact revenue from operations? How do workers comp costs impact this highly important? Number two, your senior manager, when you can talk in their language, when you can quantify these costs in a language, they understand that’s important them that can now get, get their attention. Again, very rarely are you going to have just this hundred percent approval? Yay, you’ll go ahead and do whatever you want. You have an unlimited budget and resources that just doesn’t happen, but you can get that pilot and you can build some of that momentum from a financial standpoint, a highly effective way to do this.

Leverage the Cost of Individual Claims

Number three, if this isn’t working, or if you need a little bit of a booster in order to now start to get, have them pay attention, you can look at the impact one individual claim.

So one individual claim there’s two motivating factors for human beings. One is financial or particularly in a business sense. What does financial one is emotional when it’s financial, one is emotional individual claims can often really pull that emotional lever. They pull that emotional lever. So you’ve got one claim. That’s, you know, it was $375,000 and your company is a trucking company. And you’re like, we’re trying to build, you know, we need a, we need really to replace a number of the trucks on our fleet. And in order to do that, you know, for the Southwest division, that would probably cost us, you know, all around 390,000 or whatever the number is. And this one individual claim costs us 375. It could be a major impact when you start to quantify it in those terms, in the cost of individual claim. So financially it pulls that lever and then emotionally, oftentimes it’s fraud.

Emotional Impact Can Drive Behavior

So oftentimes the emotional lover fraud can be a major impact and a major driver for management commitment. So if you could dial that in, you can say, well, John Smith, this is what John did. And he pulled one over and it costs, you know, the company, you know, 270k or you know, or a hundred thousand or whatever the number is most of the time, it’s not the number. That’s the driver. It’s the fact that this isn’t going to happen here. This is not something that we’re going to allow at Acme to happen. And so that can be a big driver of emotional change management commitment. If you have, it can be a hugely powerful force if you don’t have it. It’s a massive roadblock. Again, my name is Michael Stack and I’m the CEO of Amaxx. Remember your work today in workers’ compensation can have a dramatic impact on your company’s bottom line, but it will have a dramatic impact on someone’s life. So be great.

Author Michael Stack, CEO Amaxx LLC. He is an expert in workers’ compensation cost containment systems and helps employers reduce their workers’ comp costs by 20% to 50%. He works as a consultant to large and mid-market clients, is a 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 the founder & lead trainer of Amaxx Workers’ Comp Training Center, which offers the Certified Master of Workers’ Compensation national designation.

Contact: [email protected].

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