The Informal System That Catches What Software Misses

Long before a formal screening tool ever enters the picture, someone at your company already knows which claims are likely to become a problem. It is usually the supervisor. Sometimes it is a coworker who sits nearby every day. The information already exists inside your organization. Most companies simply never build a system to capture it.

A Framework Worth Knowing

Physician and author Chris Brigham laid out a simple way to think about this in his book Living Abled: the difference between an employee who is likely to recover smoothly and one who is at meaningfully higher risk often shows up in ordinary, observable behavior long before any formal assessment ever gets involved.

Brigham’s framework does not require a clinical background to apply correctly. It asks a handful of straightforward, practical questions about the employee. What is their general attitude like day to day? Are they honest and direct, or do excuses pile up around missed deadlines and responsibilities? How do they typically handle setbacks and frustration? What does their overall satisfaction with the job actually look like on a normal week?

None of these questions require a screening form or specialized training to answer. They simply require paying attention to people you already work alongside.

Reading the Early Signals

An employee who comes in grateful, engaged, and generally satisfied with the job tends to move through a workers’ comp claim without much friction. They show up to appointments consistently. They ask reasonable questions about their treatment plan. They accept modified duty when it is offered, rather than treating it as an insult. An employee who arrives already frustrated, chronically dissatisfied, or visibly disengaged from the job carries a meaningfully different kind of risk into any claim that follows. That does not mean the claim is automatically doomed to become catastrophic. It means the claim deserves a second look before problems have a chance to compound.

Supervisors and coworkers already have this information sitting in their heads. They know who complains constantly about everything, who seems checked out during meetings, who is visibly dealing with a rough patch outside of work. The real challenge is not gathering this information. It is building a system that actually captures and uses it consistently.

The Yellow Flag: A Concrete Trigger Point

Attitude and job satisfaction are useful early signals, but they remain fairly subjective. What turns this from a vague gut impression into something genuinely actionable is a more concrete, observable marker: participation.

Participation is measurable in a way that general attitude simply is not. Did the employee report the injury promptly, or did it take two or three weeks to surface? Are they showing up to scheduled appointments, or missing them repeatedly without explanation? Are they actively engaging with the claims process, or going quiet and unresponsive? Are they accepting reasonable transitional duty, or turning it down without a clear or defensible reason?

When informal observations about attitude line up with a genuine participation problem, that combination functions as what amounts to a yellow flag. It is not a diagnosis, and it is certainly not a guarantee the claim will become catastrophic. It is a clear signal that the claim deserves closer attention and, potentially, a formal screening tool, before the situation has a chance to escalate further and become far more expensive to unwind.

Why This Layer Matters Before Anything Formal

It is tempting to skip straight to formal screening questionnaires and bypass the informal layer entirely. That is a mistake worth avoiding. Formal tools work best when they are triggered by something specific, rather than applied blanket-style to every single claim regardless of context or need.

The yellow flag system gives claims teams a genuinely low-cost, no-additional-tool-required way to decide where formal screening deserves priority attention first. It also catches something formal tools can sometimes miss entirely: the employee whose paperwork and forms look perfectly fine on paper, but whose day-to-day behavior tells a noticeably different story.

Building This Into Your Program

A few concrete steps turn this idea into an actual working system rather than a nice concept. Train supervisors specifically to notice and document attitude, satisfaction, and engagement patterns, not to diagnose or judge the employee personally, but simply to observe carefully and report what they see.

Define participation clearly and consistently for your entire claims team: prompt injury reporting, appointment attendance, responsiveness to outreach, and willingness to accept reasonable transitional duty offers. Create a simple, repeatable way to flag claims where negative attitude and poor participation show up together, so nothing meaningful falls through the cracks between departments or handoffs.

Treat the yellow flag consistently as a trigger for closer attention and, where genuinely appropriate, a formal screening tool, rather than as a final judgment about the employee’s character or intentions.

The Real Advantage

The most effective claims management systems do not rely purely on sophisticated software or expensive predictive analytics platforms. They pair simple, observable human signals with the organizational discipline to actually act on them consistently. Your supervisors already see the early warning signs playing out in real time. The only real question left is whether your program is built to catch them before the claim goes off the rails.

Michael Stack, CEO of Amaxx LLC, is an expert in workers’ compensation cost containment systems and provides education, training, and consulting to help employers reduce their workers’ compensation costs by 20% to 50%. He is co-author of the #1 selling comprehensive training guide “Your Ultimate Guide to Mastering Workers’ Comp Costs: Reduce Costs 20% to 50%.” Stack is the creator of Injury Management Results (IMR) software and founder of Amaxx Workers’ Comp Training Center. WC Mastery Training teaching injury management best practices such as return to work, communication, claims best practices, medical management, and working with vendors. IMR software simplifies the implementation of these best practices for employers and ties results to a Critical Metrics Dashboard.

Contact: mstack@reduceyourworkerscomp.com.

Workers’ Comp Roundup Blog: http://blog.reduceyourworkerscomp.com/

Injury Management Results (IMR) Software: https://imrsoftware.com/

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