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How much assistance are you getting from your insurance company in reducing your injury and accident rates? While your insurance company may be assisting you in tracking losses and/or conducting safety audits, there is a good chance that additional programs are available – if you know what questions to ask.

“The people who are administering your safety program have to be in direct contact with the insurance company,” Rick Rollo, vice-president of Kujawa Enterprises, Inc. in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, says. “It can’t just be your CFO (chief financial officer) or accounts payable who talks to them. Your CFO may be the person who shops for your insurance, but he or she isn’t the one who implements your safety program.”

In Kujawa’s case, the company was doing some “comparative shopping on insurance, and all of these other companies started telling us about the different programs they had to help us manage our accidents/incidents,” Rollo says.

“We then called our insurance agent, and asked why our present insurance company didn’t offer these plans. He told us that they did, and that he had offered them to us with no response. We then found out that he was talking to the wrong people. The people paying the bills and/or choosing the insurance are not the people who need these programs,” he says.

Questions to Ask

Kujawa’s insurance agent followed up by putting the appropriate company managers in direct contact with the risk management people at its insurance company. “Then things really started to happen,” Rollo says.

One major project facilitated by the insurance company was a four-month, “hands-on” field study aimed at reducing injuries and accidents among maintenance workers. The project, which involved an insurance company representative, maintenance crew chiefs, and maintenance workers, identified those tasks with the greatest injury potential. The resulting report clearly spelled out each of the identified tasks’ injury potential, risk factors, possible solutions, and the approximate cost of each solution. It also included photos of company workers performing the tasks.

The following are among the questions Rollo suggests you ask your insurance agent or insurance company:

• What specific programs or assistance can you give us? What do you have available to help us become a safer company?
• Do you have the ability to conduct a safety audit of our company, and do you have other recommendations to make our company safer?
• Do you have any relationships with safety equipment suppliers that provide personal protective equipment (PPE)?

Another question a smaller PLANET member company recently asked its insurance company was “whether they would pay to have our safety sessions translated into Spanish,” Leslie Herndon, safety officer at Greenscape, Inc. in Holly Springs, North Carolina, says.

“They said they had never been asked that before, but ‘sure,’ they would help us,” she says. The insurance company paid for a woman with a human resources background that Greenscape had used in the past to verbally translate the company’s safety sessions. Herndon says that it worked out well.

Reminder: Don’t be afraid to ask for additional assistance from your insurance company. If you are not satisfied, it won’t hurt to shop around until you find a company that will work proactively with you to help reduce your injuries, accidents, and related costs.

5/06

By Barbara Mulhern, PLANET Safety Specialist