“If we hand them a soft job, everybody will want to get hurt.” Most of us have heard some version of that from a plant manager or a supervisor, usually right after an injured employee came back on modified work and sat at a desk for a week.
It sounds like common sense. It is also backwards, and believing it costs more than the light duty ever would.
The belief starts with one bad assignment
Someone gets parked in a chair with nothing to do and full pay, and the crew notices. Now light duty looks like a paid break, and the manager decides the program is the problem.
What he saw was real. What he concluded was not. The problem was the job, not the idea of having one.
The research points the other way
A review of 13 higher quality studies found injured workers offered modified work returned to work about twice as often as those not offered it, and modified work programs cut lost work days in half (Krause et al., Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 1998). Most of those studies were observational, so the fair word is “associated with,” not “caused.” Still, nothing in them shows modified work drawing more claims.
Now think about what the alternative rewards. An employee at home with no job to come back to keeps getting a check, loses touch with the crew, and starts to wonder whether there is still a place for them. That is the claim that gets longer and more expensive, not the one where someone is back sorting parts on day two.
What actually makes light duty look like a reward
When light duty goes wrong, it is usually one of these:
- There is no list of real modified jobs, so each supervisor makes one up on the spot.
- The assignment has no end date and nobody reviews it.
- The work has no value to the department, so some people read it as punishment and others as a vacation.
- Nobody told employees, before anyone got hurt, that modified work is how the company handles every injury.
Every one of those is a design problem or a consistency problem. None of them is a reason to send people home.
If you want the basics on how an assignment is built, start with what transitional duty is and how it works.
What do your employees hear before they get hurt?
Get the 9 element blueprint for your employee injury brochure
Look at your last three injuries instead
Pull the last three injuries that came with work restrictions. For each one, ask four things. Was a modified job offered within a day or two? Was it real work? Did it have an end date? Would the answer have been the same at your other locations, or on the other shift?
If the answers depend on which supervisor was working, you have found the real problem, and it was never light duty. Light duty is simple to define and hard to execute consistently across people, departments and locations. That gap is where the reward story comes from.
Does it depend on which supervisor is on shift?
Twelve questions, five minutes, and a score you can take to your team.
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