Safety Tips Newsletter Archives

March 2010, Safety – Down You Go! – Has it ever happened to you? One second you’re busy doing your job, the next second you’re picking yourself up off the ground! The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that about 15% of work-related fatalities result from falls. Of the deaths resulting from falls, most were from roofs or scaffolds. However, about 11% of fall-related fatalities occur on level surfaces.

February 2010, Safety – Common Sense Safety – When is the last time you thought (or said), “What were you thinking!?!” Why is it necessary to have a “Stupid Motorist Law?” Have you noticed that common sense is not so common?

January 2010, Safety – Look What We’ve Done Now! – Happy New Year! Each new year invigorates us to focus and to invest effort and resources to assist you in keeping workers safe and costs down. For that reason, we’re rolling out even more resources and making them even easier to access than ever before. Our online Safety Resources have undergone a total makeover! (From www.cbri.com, navigate to “My CBR/Safety Resources.” Your userid and password is cbri.)

November 2009, Safety – Making the Most of a Bad Situation – So, one of your workers is injured and out of commission. Not only is your workers comp policy paying medical expenses and compensation for lost wages (direct costs), which greatly affects your emod and future rates; but that incident is also indirectly costing your company money in lost revenue, damage to property or equipment, hiring and/or training replacements, disruption of workflow, etc.

October 2009, Safety – Making Your Office a Safe Place – Okay, let’s be honest! When is the last time you took a stroll through your office space with an eye on hazards? Been a while?

September 2009, Safety – Evaluating Your Safety Program – It’s the perfect storm to wreck your workers comp rates! (Not to mention, our Injury Counselor’s nightmare!) In this scenario, at least four crucial things happened that will greatly affect our ability to assist the injured worker:

August 2009, Safety – Evaluating Your Safety Program – It’s “back to school” time! What determines the grade level a student will enter? Will the student take basic math or advanced algebra? The answer lies in the fact that students have been evaluated. School officials know in what direction to send a young person, based on where they are right now academically.

July 2009, Safety – Supersizing Workers Comp Costs - America has become a “supersized” nation. We supersize our fries, we supersize our Coke’s and Pepsi’s, we supersize our meal portions…and, as a result, we have supersized our workforce.

Read more to discover what the statistics say, and what you can do today to buck the trend.

June 2009, Safety – OSHA: Friend or Foe? - What is your first thought when you hear “OSHA?”

• “OSHA only applies to construction.”
• “All they want to do is put us out of business!”
• “It’s impossible to live up to their standards, so why bother?”
• “They are nosy and inspect jobsites for no good reason.”

More often than not, reactions to the subject of OSHA are negative. Is it deserved, or are there myths to be dispelled? Is OSHA friend or foe to employees and employers? Let’s sort out some of the myths and some of the truths about OSHA.

May 2009, Safety – Maintaining Healthy Hands – Name three things you do at work in which you DO NOT use your hands. That’s a difficult assignment, isn’t it? Now, list three things in life that you most enjoy doing. Do they involve using your hands? What would life be like if you couldn’t use one or both hands for even a short time? Maintaining healthy hands is critical to every worker’s quality of life, yet over 16 million American workers suffer hand injuries every year. That’s one every 32 seconds! By recognizing hazards that lead to hand injuries and taking safety precautions, hand injuries are 100% preventable!

April 2009, Safety – A Money Pit or a Reasonable Expense? – Are you spending too much for workers’ comp insurance? By law, you are required to provide worker’s compensation coverage for employees. However, you are NOT required to overpay for that insurance. For your company, it may be a reasonable expense…or it may be a money pit! You may be spending much more for it than necessary, or it may actually be a type of “profit center” for you. If you are a CBR client, your policy likely renews on May 1. What better time than now to discover which is true of your company.

March 2009, Safety – How many is too many? – When it comes to accidents in the work place, how many is too many? If your company incurred only 25 injuries this year, would that be okay? How about 10 injuries? How about 5? Or, how about 1? How many is too many?

February 2009, Safety – Help! What do I do in a Down Economy! – Times were good! Sam Smart, a brilliant young man, opened his business several years ago and watched it prosper. The excitement of success ran throughout his company and he rewarded good workers with good wages. Yes, times were good. However, as the housing market began to sag, fuel prices began to soar, and the economy headed south, Sam found himself in a tough situation. In a short time, sales dropped 35% and Sam began to “tighten the belt.” A year into the recession, sales were down 65% and Sam’s company was struggling to survive. Sadly, he had to lay off most of the good workers in whom he had invested time and good wages.

January 2009, Safety – Something New! – Happy New Year! As we kick off 2009, CBR is providing a much improved resource! Safety Webinars are now being recorded and posted to our website! Not only are they available at your convenience, but they are FREE to CBR clients! Check out CBR’s Safety Webinar page for links to webinars currently available. More are being added as we record them. (If you are a CBR client and don’t know your userid and password, contact Kym Varner immediately!)

November 2008, Safety – Don’t Become a HazCom Statistic! – It is virtually impossible to comply with OSHA’s Hazard Communication standard. In fact, I am willing to guess that, if OSHA sent an inspector to any worksite in the US, they would quickly and easily find HazCom violations. Is it any wonder that, year-after-year, it is one of the most frequently cited violations by OSHA inspectors? Before your eyeballs roll back in your head and you throw up your hands in defeat, stay with me! We’re going to take a brief look at the standard and how you can avoid becoming another OSHA HazCom statistic!

October 2008, Safety – Oh My Aching Back! – Suppose you walk out on your lawn every morning to pick up the newspaper. On your way in the house, you stop to pet the dog. Before scurrying off to work you spend your last precious seconds stooping down to hug your toddler good bye. Over the course of 10 years, you would have placed over 15 million pounds of additional stress on your lower back as a result of those seemingly innocuous movements! Most back injuries are the result of cumulative effect rather than an acute incident. Is it any wonder that low back pain is the most common cause of decreases in work capacity for workers between the ages of 25-44?

September 2008, Safety – We’ve Got a Secret! – Why does one company go through an entire year without a single loss-time incident while another company in the same type of business experiences three times as many loss-time accidents than the industry average? Is one company just lucky? Does it know some magical secret the other company does not?

August 2008, Safety – Take the Offensive! – Thousands of workers are injured and/or killed on the job every day in the United States. Those injuries and deaths cost American companies $175 billion. Those loses are needless, as injuries are almost 100% avoidable. Wouldn’t it be of great benefit to eliminate hazards before they eliminate your employees?

July 2008, Safety – Safety: A 4:1 Return on Investment! -Is safety a budget item at your business? If you said no, you are not alone. In fact, just a few short years ago you would have been hard pressed to find a small business that did incorporate safety into their budget plans. Budgeting for safety is usually not included in most management seminars or traditional business school curriculum. But the pendulum is beginning to swing as more and more companies discover the role safety can play in the bottom line success of their business. The Department of Labor calculates that for every dollar you invest in safety you receive a four-dollar return. Companies who budget for safety have learned that safety pays.

June 2008, Safety – Slips, Trips and Falls: Employees’ Greatest Danger! – According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 261,470 American workers were injured in slips, trips and falls in 2006. An additional 827 lost their lives. Though 49% of those fatalities were from rooftops, ladders and scaffolding, 11% were falls on level ground or on stairs or steps. That indicates that even employees in “safe” environments such as office settings, medical facilities and retail stores suffered falls severe enough to lose their lives!

May 2008, Safety – Safety Programs: Are They Possible and Do They Really Work? – What value does safety have in your company? Is it an important element, or is it an afterthought when someone gets hurt? Is safety something you work at, but find it difficult to implement and enforce? If your Safety Program is not all you desire it to be, is it due to lack of information? Lack of “know how?” Lack of direction?

April 2008, Safety – How Many is Too Many? – Americans would be in an uproar…and well they should be! Each of those headlines is totally unacceptable! Yet, those are statistics we would read if those industries sustained only a 1% (or less) occurrence rate.

March 2008, Safety – Making Safety Fun! – Employees hate safety meetings! Safety experts tell us they are important, but what a grind! Who wants to sit through boring meetings, with a boring speaker, talking about a boring subject! What a waste of time!

February 2008, Safety – Injured Employee Wins Multi-Million Dollar Settlement Against EmployerThat news would be enough to put many companies out of business. How about you? Could you withstand a multi-million dollar hit to your personal financial status, or to your company’s bottom line?

January 2008, Safety – A Look Back and a Look Ahead – A new year means new horizons and new goals. It means a fresh start in making the most of a brand new year. A new year also brings the opportunity to look back over the previous year and assess triumphs, victories, successes and failures. At CBR we set and assess goals every year, with the purposeful intent to serve our clients with excellence

December 2007, Safety – Know Your Liabilities -“I should have insisted that he wear his safety equipment.” – ”That guy has been doing this job for years. I didn’t think it would happen to him.”
“He would still be alive if we had taken the time to show him the proper way to operate that machine.” No one wants to hear those words. Unfortunately, statements like these are heard all too often after a worker is injured or killed on the job. If, in worst-case scenario, such an injury or death occurred in your company, would these words ring true?

November 2007, Safety – There is a Reason! -“Why all the fuss about my employees’ job tasks?” Why can’t we just send injured workers to the nearest medical facility?” “What’s the big deal about getting injured workers back to work immediately?” The CBR Risk Department fields these questions regularly. There is a reason for each of these things, and you need to be informed! We strive mightily to balance the care of your employees with the cost to your company to provide workers’ compensation coverage. No one wants their employees neglected, and no one wants to pay excessive amounts for insurance coverage.

October 2007, Safety – “Safety Inspections and Job Hazard Analysis” – Statements like these are more common than they should be. Far too often, accidents “just happen” out of the blue, resulting in thousands of injuries and millions of dollars in claim costs. Could this be avoided? What if you could reverse time and “undo” that accident. Would you? Of course you would!

September 2007, Safety – Training and Supervision – Injuries occur because of unsafe conditions and/or unsafe acts, 98% of which are preventable. However, if no one is trained to recognize those hazards, and no one is trained to protect against those hazards, then the risk remains high.

August 2007, Safety - Workers Comp “Cost Drivers” – Why are my company’s rates higher than my competitor’s rates? Good question! Workers comp rates are affected by a company’s frequency and severity of losses. Perhaps your competitor has recognized how to drive costs down. Here are some downward cost drivers:

July 2007, Safety – Heat and the Human Body – Heat kills more people than hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes or any other weather-related cause. Summertime is here and, in Arizona, heat is a tremendous concern. However, in any state where you have employees working outside in above average temperatures, there is a significant risk of heat illness.

June 2007, Safety – Accident Prevention Workers Safe and Costs Down – All accidents are the result of either risky behavior and/or hazardous conditions. In one specific study, 75,000 accidents were analyzed and it was found that 66,000 (88%) were caused by unsafe acts. An additional 7,500 (10%) were cased by unsafe conditions. By reducing unsafe acts and unsafe conditions, injuries could be reduced dramatically.

May 2007, Safety – Return to Work Programs: Good for the Employee, Good for the Employer – There is a false belief among some workers that, if they are injured, they will be off work, but will continue to collect regular wages. However, rarely are the true effects realized.The most dramatic cost effect may be on your company’s experience modifier (emod), particularly if you are a large company. An emod is a factor that is applied to WC rates. Therefore, it affects your entire payroll.

April 2007, Safety - Subrogation: How it Works and How it Saves You Money. The cause of injury could be the result of another person’s negligence or another company’s faulty product. If so, these claims should not be charged to your workers comp policy.