Ask one of your managers what he is supposed to do after an injured employee goes home. Most will give you an honest answer: fill out the report, send it to HR, and wait to hear when the employee is cleared. Now pull your last five lost time claims and ask who called the employee during the first week. At a lot of locations the answer is nobody.
Nobody called and missed him. Nobody left a voicemail. Nobody called at all.
That is the most common gap I see in employer programs, and it hides well, because every person in the chain believes someone else has it covered.
Nobody calls because nobody was told to
The manager assumes HR is in touch. HR assumes the adjuster is in touch. The adjuster is in touch, about the claim: forms, recorded statements, payment. Nobody is talking to the employee about his job, his crew, or when he is coming back.
Some managers stay away on purpose. They worry they will say the wrong thing, or that a call will look like pressure to come back early. Others mean to call and lose the week to a staffing hole and a late truck. None of that is a character flaw. Each manager is doing exactly what the program asked of him, which on this point is nothing.
Most employers have a defined process for the first report. Very few have one for the conversation that follows it. Who calls the employee, how soon, what they say, and how anyone would know it happened are all left to each manager to work out alone.
The silence has a price
In NCCI’s study of 44 states, attorneys were involved in 13 percent of claims reported immediately and 32 percent of those reported after four weeks (NCCI, 2015). NCCI is careful to call that a relationship, not proof that delay causes the attorney. Report lag is simply the silence employers already measure, the gap between the injury and the first time anyone acted on it.
WCRI looked at why injured workers hire attorneys and found it was when they felt threatened: they believed they would be fired, felt their supervisor doubted the injury was legitimate, or believed their claim had been denied, even when it was later paid (Victor and Savych, WCRI, 2010).
Think about how a week of no contact reads from the couch. The employee does not decide his manager is busy. He decides his manager thinks he is faking it, or that his job is gone. Nobody said either thing. The silence said it for them.
You can see the first silence in the report lag column on your loss run. The silence after the report shows up on no report at all.
“Our managers care” is not a protocol
Every employer has a few managers who call without being asked. They check in the next day, they ask about the family, they tell the employee the crew misses him. Their claims tend to close faster, and leadership points to them as proof the program works.
But that is the program working only where that manager happens to be. The employee hurt on second shift at the other location gets a different company. Same policy, same carrier, a completely different experience of what happens after you get hurt, and that experience is what injured employees remember long after they recover.
Calling an injured employee is simple to define. Everyone agrees managers should do it. Getting it to happen the same way across people, departments and locations, every time, without depending on who is on shift or how busy the week is, takes a system.
What a communication protocol settles
A protocol takes the decisions off the manager and makes the call a routine step, the way a lockout or a forklift inspection is. It answers five things in advance:
- Who makes the call. A named person at each location and on each shift, not “management.”
- When. In the systems we install, the first call is the same day or the next, then a check in every week while the case is open.
- What is said. The employee is cared about, here is what happens next, we want you back. No claim questions, no medical opinions.
- Where it is recorded, so the call exists somewhere other than the manager’s memory.
- Who sees a missed call, and what happens next.
The last two are where most attempts fall apart. An employer sends a memo saying managers should check in with injured employees. For a month, some do. Then the memo is forgotten, because nothing showed whether the calls were made and nobody was asked about the ones that were not.
In a working system, a missed check in is an exception with an owner. It shows up on the location’s weekly scorecard, someone with authority closes it inside the week, and a manager who keeps missing gets a conversation and then a consequence. Skip that and you get the manager everyone likes and no one corrects, and the program drifts back to whatever each manager feels like doing.
Do your employees know what happens after an injury?
Get the 9 element blueprint for your employee injury brochure
What to check this week
Pick your three most recent lost time claims. For each one, ask the manager two questions: when did you first speak with the employee after the injury, and what were you told to do once he went home?
If the first answer is “I haven’t” or “HR handles that,” you have found the gap. If the second answer is “nothing specific,” you have found why. Neither one is about the manager. Both are about a program that never told him the call was his job.
Contact: mstack@reduceyourworkerscomp.com
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