Cutting your losses in the workplace

In the local government workplace, every accident, claim or incident may involve uninsured or underinsured losses and/or deductibles that can become costly for municipalities. Although such situations may be virtually unavoidable in the long run, loss control planning can limit their negative consequences.

The costs of accidents can be viewed as the various disruptions of the normal work procedures that occur when the accidents take place. City or county property may be damaged and contractors may need to be hired – not a welcome expense in times of tight municipal budgets.

Accidents can result in downtime, extra administrative time, retraining of existing workers and training of replacement workers. Downtime can mean delayed completion of work.

These are just a few of the costs that are absorbed by local governments; in some cases, the costs can exceed the amounts covered by insurance. Effective loss control can help to reduce these costs.

A qualified loss control professional can provide safety surveys of local government facilities. He or she can help implement a methodical approach to self inspection, training and loss prevention.

Developing a safety plan is perhaps the most important component of a methodical approach to loss control. For the plan to be effective, top officials must be committed to it, and someone must be given the responsibility, authority and budget for seeing the plan through.

Carrying out an accident analysis is the first step in developing a successful safety plan. Staff members in charge of the analysis should review and categorize the local government’s past accident cases and identify the causes of each case, as well as the patterns and related factors among the different cases.

The next step, communication and training, involves sharing the information compiled through the accident analysis with those who might be affected by similar accidents in the future.

The training element of this step can take the form of five- or 10-minute safety talks or more formal training. Department leaders can also supplement the safety training of their employees with informational posters, printed bulletins, paycheck stuffers or novelty gifts as reminders of safety precautions.

They can motivate employees to heed these precautions through formal directives and work rules, as well as through contests and incentives.

Supervisors play a critical role in successful safety programs. Thus, training for supervisors is an excellent idea, since they need to understand the goals of management concerning safety, buy into those goals and be equipped to work with their employees toward the objectives.

Supervisors are responsible for field implementation of the safety plan and directives. Supervisors should thus be held accountable for the safety performance of their departments or agencies, just as they are held accountable for their department’s general performance.

The next step, inspection, is necessary to ensure compliance with injury control measures, as well as to follow up on the findings of the accident analysis. In areas where physical conditions can be altered to prevent reoccurrence of historical problems, the city or county should issue work orders to solve the problems. If a machine contributed to a past accident, all similar machines should be inspected and altered accordingly.

Insurance costs and uninsured costs are too high for local governments to ignore. Controlling these costs means looking methodically at past problems and striving to make sure they do not reappear