By ROSALIE DONLON
The baggage handlers, wheelchair pushers, janitors and security guards in airports, health care facilities and shopping malls are just part of the scenery to most people.
But to Greg Lorenzi, senior vice president of SMS Holdings Corp. in Nashville, Tennessee, they’re the biggest part of the workforce that he's responsible for keeping safe.
SMS Holdings provides full housekeeping and maintenance programs throughout the United States in retail, airport, hospitality and health care locations, including Nissan Stadium, home of the Tennessee Titans. With approximately 9,000 employees in 500 locations, Lorenzi faced a daunting task when he took over risk management. “These are all physical jobs,” he notes. “Our employees are never not doing something physical.”
In Lorenzi's job, no two days are the same—and his job is all about keeping employees healthy and loss costs as low as possible. “Claims are always going to have some cost,” he says. “Risk management is about losing less.”
Lorenzi, who has been with SMS for 15 years, started out in the finance department; in 2008 he was asked to take on risk management, which fit in with his finance background. “I didn't know anything about insurance or risk management when I started,” he admits, but Lorenzi brought a new set of eyes and different ideas to the job. There was one question he kept asking: “Why are we doing things this way?”
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As with most companies, after labor costs, risk management is the most expensive piece of the budget and the most volatile. Three years ago, SMS developed a strategy to improve the process for injured workers as well as to improve the management of its workers’ compensation costs. The first step was establishing a nationwide campaign that would emphasize making safety the No. 1 goal for all employees across multiple locations in 46 states. Yet what works for one location may not work in another, and what works for one job category doesn't always translate to another.
From the Bottom Up
“We can't sit in our corporate offices and expect that anyone working in our entry-level, minimum-wage jobs will follow anything we have to say [about safety],” says Lorenzi. “We aren't doing those jobs, and can't really understand the risks.”
Most employees look to their front-line supervisor as the boss. “They don't know who I am or who the CEO is, or even who the regional manager is,” Lorenzi observes. “It's all about their immediate supervisor.” And that manager is the one directly communicating with employees just how important safety is and how seriously it is taken at SMS.
SMS created a safety campaign (“Stop. Think. Act.”) with the aid of its in-house marketing team to spread the word. “We wanted to keep it something basic that our front-line employees could understand,” Lorenzi explains, “and that's how we came up with ‘Stop. Think. Act.’ We didn't want some fancy insurance term that no one could relate to.”
SMS put a number of programs into place that help promote the company's safety culture, including a contest among employees to develop new safety posters supporting the “Stop. Think. Act.” campaign, with prizes awarded to the employees whose ideas were selected.
Lorenzi notes that some of the most valuable and practical safety tips came from the folks who are doing the jobs every day. For example, the housekeeping division at one shopping mall came up with a new position of safety lead. The person in that position was dedicated to conducting patrols in the mall, looking specifically for spills. The safety leads don't have additional cleaning responsibilities, which enables them to focus on hazards throughout the location, increasing safety for employees and patrons of the mall.
Mandatory Pre-Shift Huddles
Safety committees were established at each location, and each work site now holds a mandatory pre-shift safety huddle. The site managers also host weekly safety talks with their employees and address topics from proper lifting techniques to unique safety issues at their respective locations.
“The pre-shift huddles by location are critical,” Lorenzi stresses. “I can't dictate from my office in Nashville, because each employee, job and location is unique although they share some commonalities. For example, when parts of an airport or mall are closed for construction, the hazards created are complicated. Picture pushing a baggage cart or wheelchair safely under those conditions.”
In addition to the safety campaign, Lorenzi put a more effective injury tracking system in place, along with regularly scheduled safety meetings among field managers, regional managers and the risk management department. These meetings now provide a forum for managers to exchange ideas on how injuries could have been avoided and what needs to be done to prevent future incidents.
The risk management team revised SMS’s injury reporting system, standardizing the instructions and forms and providing a checklist for managers. Employees are required to report any workplace injury to their manager within 24 hours, and managers are required to report the accident to the corporate office within 24 hours. This has led to a more than 90% success rate in reporting injuries within the guidelines.
To ensure that employees know what to expect after a workplace injury, they are now provided with a packet that outlines the process and includes all the forms and contact information they may need to file their claim. The program is clearly working, Lorenzi says, and its success is illustrated in the reduced rate of litigated claims, down from 18% in 2014 to 11% in 2015.
Lorenzi relies heavily on his broker, Beecher Carlson, for its expertise in workers’ comp, safety and risk management. “I’m not an expert in insurance and they have the knowledge to manage claims effectively,” he says. He also relies on the broker's loss-control experts who visit locations with him and make recommendations to keep claims frequency down. “I don't see why people don't use their brokers,” he says.
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Managing Language Issues
Lorenzi and his team also face language issues in conveying the safety messages. At Newark Liberty International Airport, for example—the location with the most employees—many speak different African dialects. Each shift has a supervisor who speaks a specific dialect to convey the safety information orally. And many of the workers learn better by being shown safe practices than by reading.
In addition to the posters, “we hand out lanyards, bumper stickers and other logoed merchandise,” Lorenzi explains. This keeps the slogan—Stop. Think. Act.—op of mind.
Spanish is the primary language for the highest percentage of SMS’s employees. While it would be an overwhelming task to translate the safety materials into each language that the employees speak, Lorenzi adds, SMS does translate all safety materials into Spanish.
Lorenzi says the one achievement of which he's most proud is “being able to reduce losses, which includes creating a culture of safety: That's everything that we preach.” Once a claim happens it's up to him, his team, the insurer and the third-party administrator to close the claim as cost-effectively as possible while providing the best care possible. But none of that matters, he adds, if the company can't get the frequency of claims under control.
Changing the culture has had a significant effect on workers’ comp claims for SMS. Frequency of claims is down more than 14%, and lost-time claims are down 52% while payroll has increased by 14%. Clearly Lorenzi and his team are meeting their main goal in workers’ comp risk management: Lose less.
Each year, NU's Excellence in Workers’ Compensation Risk Management Award is bestowed upon three organizations with notably successful loss- control, safety and return-to-work programs. They are among the top performers in managing workers’ compensation, all of them with unique success stories to share. The 2016 award is co-sponsored by Safety National and Sedgwick. The winners will present information on their programs at the 71st annual Workers Compensation Educational Conference in Orlando August 21-24.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosalie Donlon, senior editor at PropertyCasualty360.com, has more than 20 years of professional publishing experience as a writer, editor and content acquisition strategist. Before joining Summit Professional Networks in-house, Rosalie was the contributing author and editor of several insurance industry and legal publications, including Employment Practices Liability, Guide to Captives and Alternative Risk Financing, and 2015 Retirement Plans Facts, all published by Summit. She is a graduate of the University of Toledo College of Law and Fairfield University.