Tuesday 14 April 2009

Workers Comp Costs: A Price of Doing Business?

Insuring your workforce is a tricky task. Our staff at Advisen has grown older this year as we've changed some faces and, sadly, we all seem to get older every year despite trying hard not to behave accordingly.

So our benefits renewal was not pretty - the older the staff the higher the premiums. Definitely not something we considered when making hiring decisions - but material to the expense line.

Looking at Workers Compensation insurance, there are a few main drivers for success. One of them is productivity - can you get your staff utilization up and the other is cost - can you keep your fees down and lower your workers comp coverage.

Recently we met Rebecca Shafer who's had a distinguished career at Marsh (pioneering Injury Management Consulting) and at Aon (CEO of the workers' compensation consulting unit of Aon Risk Services, Aon Management Institute (AMI) in Glastonbury, CT, and was responsible for the development of "Comp Camp.").

An attorney, Rebecca retired from Aon and must not have read enough about how hard it is to start up a company from scratch - she founded Amaxx to build the Workers Comp Kit to manage workers comp and her site at ReduceYourWorkersComp.com - also note her blog in my Blogroll to the right.

From her site "Many of her clients have experienced cost reductions of 20 to 50 percent. Her clients have included Rite Aid, Warner Lambert, Continental Airlines, U S Airways, Universal Orlando, New York Times, TV Guide, CVS, Knight-Ridder, New Haven Terminal, Centerplate, Simpkins Industries, American Tourister, and numerous other national, mid-market accounts and small accounts."

From our joint press release today comes the following pithy comment full of good keywords to get unsuspecting Google searchers to discover us at Advisen:

“Companies typically spend 30% of their risk management dollar on workers’ compensation, according to the RIMS 2008 Benchmarking Survey, but most managers are unsure how they can reduce these costs,” said Mason Power, GM of Advisen. “While companies buying workers comp and their brokers are a key part of the 100,000 industry professionals who subscribe to Advisen, the Workers’ Comp Kit® also offers a predictive analysis enabling insurance companies, state funds, captives and reinsurers to establish a threshold risk profile for underwriting purposes. This partnership further demonstrates Advisen’s commitment to providing invaluable insight to the commercial insurance marketplace.”

Beyond the salesy stuff (the WC Kit is for sale through our store), it's clear that our subscribers find Rebecca's work relevant, particularly how it helps them benchmark workers comp producitvity and cost. We ran a series of seminars with hundreds of attendees on each session and the feedback has been terrific. ReduceYourWorkersComp is a welcome addition to our Partners (see here for further info about the partnership). Rebecca and Advisen will be at the upcoming RIMS conference in Orlando starting this Sunday.

1 comment:

Becks said...

Employers are not atuned to the fact that workers' comp is a manageable expense just like any area of the business -- workplace injuries are NOT a cost of doing business. While many "accidents" are preventable, the procedures for AFTER the incident must be in place BEFORE the injury occurs.

If they aren't the EMPLOYEE - not the employer - is in charge and now managing the after-care.

It's not difficult, you just need to get STARTED NOW!

Becki