Most employers review their workers’ compensation results as one number. Claims this year against claims last year, total incurred, the experience mod. Those numbers matter, and they are also where problems go to hide.
A company wide average blends your best run location with your worst one and reports something in between. The location where every injury is reported the same shift and every employee is back on modified work within days gets averaged together with the one where reports arrive a week late and nobody has a light duty list. The average looks acceptable. One of those locations is carrying the program and the other is costing it, and the summary cannot tell you which.
Why the spread is the real finding
When the same company, with the same carrier, the same policies and the same handbook, gets very different results at different sites, the difference is not the policy. It is execution. Some location managers built the habits and some did not. Some supervisors were shown what to do and some were handed a binder.
That is good news, because it means the fix is already working somewhere in your own organization. You do not need to import a best practice from an industry report. You need to find the location that is already doing it and make the others run the same way.
Why most employers never see it
The data usually exists. Loss runs carry a location field, and so do most incident reports. What is missing is the habit of cutting the numbers by location and putting each location’s results in front of the person who runs it.
Without that, the conversation about workers’ compensation happens once a year at renewal, at the corporate level, in aggregate, among people who were not on the floor for any of the injuries. Nobody at the location level ever sees their own numbers, so nobody at the location level is accountable for them.
The protocol
Cut every metric by location
Report lag, lost days per claim, percentage of claims with a written transitional offer, claim frequency per hundred employees. Every one of them by location, every quarter.
Normalize before you compare
A large location will have more claims than a small one. Compare rates, not counts: claims per hundred employees, or per hundred thousand hours worked. Otherwise the review becomes an argument about headcount.
Give each location an owner
Each location manager owns that location’s numbers. Not the safety department and not HR at headquarters. The person who can change what happens on the floor.
Review it on a schedule
A short quarterly review, location by location, with the same few numbers in the same order. The point is not to punish the worst location. It is to ask what the best one does differently, and to make that the standard.
What to measure
- Each core metric by location, as a rate
- The gap between your best and worst location on each one
- Whether that gap is closing quarter over quarter
The gap is the number to watch. It is usually larger than the gap between you and your industry, and unlike your industry, it is entirely within your control.
Where to start
Take your most recent loss run and sort it by location. Count claims and lost days for each, and divide by headcount. It takes an afternoon, and most employers who do it find their most expensive location is not the one they expected.