Depending on your specific occupation and industry, workers’ compensation currently exists in one of four forms: wage replacement, medical treatment, vocational rehabilitation and additional benefits. While such policies are in place to protect the rights of your workers, as well as to ensure their long-term health, workers’ compensation claims are frequently subject to fraud, embellishment and other forms of deception. Moreover, frequent claims, even those which represent legitimate or serious injuries, will drive up insurance premiums for your company. As such, it’s important that employers minimize their workforce’s workers’ compensation claims by following these five simple strategies.

Treat Small Injuries Quickly

Treating small on-the-job injuries quickly, efficiently and appropriately not only has a direct effect on workers, compensation claims, but it also ensures any injured worker will be able to resume their productivity as soon as possible.

Apart from providing immediate medical treatment to small injuries, it is also important for managers to facilitate thorough and timely reporting on any injuries that occur under their watch. Implementing a standardized system of incident reporting makes it easy to compare claims in the future, disseminate any trends and target any specific issues.

Prioritize Safety

Whatever you do, make sure to instill the importance of safety within the workplace. Posters, banners and other forms of media can all be used to reinforce safety standards and to broadcast strategies for maintaining a safe workplace in the future. Internal training programs, refresher courses and group-oriented learning sessions are all great methods to prioritizing safety and driving home the importance of workplace safety in the 21^st century.

Furthermore, always make sure to have appropriate emergency procedures in place, including emergency evacuation plans. Make such information available to your employees by posting maps of all building exits in a highly visible place.

Eliminate Workplace Hazards

Many on-the-job accidents can easily be avoided simply by organizing a workplace. This is especially true in warehouse and factory environments where heavy equipment and industrial machinery are used in various parts of a facility. If possible, try to keep such appliances in an area where they won’t be in the way of your everyday employees. If necessary, you can even restrict access to such areas of a warehouse or factory.

Hold Managers Accountable

At the end of the day, it’s the managers who need to be held accountable for any serious delinquencies regarding workplace safety.  If necessary, monitor the day-to-day activities of your managerial staff in order to guarantee the enforcement of safety protocol and to promote proper safety techniques. Doing so could go a long way in ensuring the long-term health of your workforce.

Establish an Internal Return-to-Work Program

When your employees are sidelined for an extended period of time due to serious injury or illness, it’s important to send them through a highly structured return-to-work program. Depending on the length of absence, such a program might be necessary to re-orient, re-educate or even re-train your staff members. When used correctly, however, return-to-work programs have been shown to drastically reduce future incidents and injuries.

A leader in light industrial staffing, Automation Personnel Services also places employees in manufacturing and distribution services, engineering and technical management positions and office support services. Let us know how we can help your company today!