Does your staff practice Safety Mindfulness?
By Maria McClain, Director of RETRO Member Services
In the last couple of years, RS has noticed an increase in unusual or uncommon accidents, particularly in the Auto Group. These accidents may have been prevented if “safety distancing” had been kept between a worker and a potential hazard, or additional caution was taken especially with an inexperienced or mature worker.
Labor & Industries charges higher hourly rates to the Auto Group than the Retail Group based on the higher hazard tasks involved in auto retail operations. We encourage you to ask yourself a few key questions that would keep your workers safe and keep your rates low.
- What kind of a Safety Culture have you created?
- Are you keeping safety on the minds of your employees?
- Do you have weekly safety meetings, practice good housekeeping, and talk about incidents and near misses?
- Are you reminding workers not to take unnecessary risks and to use proper tools during the day?
All the points mentioned above are crucial to help keep your workers focused on being safe and preventing loss of work. These things can be easily overlooked when employees are just trying to get their daily work completed.
Safety mindfulness is essential to keep the workers safe and your premium rates down. Hindsight is 20/20, but a harder lesson is when you see your co-worker/friend severely injured. Prevention is the cure to most of these scenarios.
In addition to preventing injury, your mindfulness during the claims process is just as important. What do you do once the claims have already been filed? What are you doing to help keep your rates down?
Working closely with your Claims Analyst at Retail Services will help mitigate additional costs, especially during the pandemic. You may have noticed that there have been delays in treatment and return to work due to COVID. The workers affected should be your top priority for return to work. Ask yourself, “How involved am I in my workers’ recovery and how are they progressing?”
Statistics show that keeping in touch on a regular basis with an injured worker is very important and often shortens the time they are off. Knowing you care is assuring and helps all workers who are struggling with pain and disability. Are you aware of how they are progressing and what is the anticipated recovery time?
If you aren’t aware of the status of your worker, be sure to contact your Claims Analyst for guidance. It is important to review return to work issues. We must all do our part to keep employees safe and healthy. The RS team is here to help.