April 2016

The extent most employees know about fire safety in their buildings is likely just when they need to exit the facilities for some sort of drill. It can stop your employees from having any type of urgency, and then people can get complacent about fire safety. Don’t let this happen when you create more awareness and follow the proper procedures.

Identify and Communicate

What’s the most important thing about exiting your building when there’s a fire? Is it that you can’t clog the main exit? It is the most likely ways a fire can start? Is is talking to people about the way they handle equipment? Fires spread fast, and you can bet in an emergency, a scared coworker isn’t going to be thinking about the last fire drill they had. When people panic, they make really unfortunate mistakes. Instead of scaring them, you just need to be sure that they know and that, more importantly, you know how it all works. Sometimes you have just a few precious minutes to ensure everyone is safe. Do you know how long it took to evacuate everyone last time, and how long it would take in an actual fire? If you don’t think that your plan is currently very realistic (and chances are, it may not be), then you need to rethink it and let your employees know. They’ll take their cues from you.

The Nuts and Bolts

Your fire plan must be in writing and visible to employees. The plan must have discuss the major hazards, the way to handle and store materials and how to control ignition sources and flammable waste materials. List the equipment best used to prevent the spread of fire for each type of hazard, and how to maintain your potentially dangerous equipment. Also give the names of who is responsible for preventing fires and those who handle the fuel sources as well. Again, while these should be easy to find, your employees should know the basics without having to reference the plan. They should know of at least two ways out of the building, and be aware of exactly where to meet. If you don’t have a sprinkler system, you may want to consider investing in one. The chances of being hurt go down dramatically, and your employees will not be in a frenzied rush to get to the exit. You’ll also want to have employees who are trained in using fire extinguishers and who know how to check the smoke alarms so that they’re functioning correctly. You may have to contact your local fire department to get the advice on where and how to install them if you’re a smaller business.

Ventilation has always been a major concern for businesses, and companies in China still struggle with even basic dust control. A workplace is made less safe on a daily basis as clutter builds up, safety techniques are ignored and employees start eying the clock right at 3:30. Your company probably has strict rules based on standard regulations, but that doesn’t mean they’re always followed in the light of reality, rush jobs and just plain carelessness. Here are a few reminders to keep it safe.

Mat Placement

It should only take one near-slip for you to start questioning whether or not you have mats in all the right areas. Restaurants in particular can get water on the ground from a variety of places (not just by the service stations), and your employees may not be be looking at the floor all the time. Every day that goes by without an accident in any facility tends to lure people into a false sense of security, but you’re only setting yourself up for a catastrophe.

Proper Ventilation

It’s not just dust that causes problems, but also fumes from chemicals that can make an employee sick over time. Any type of combustion equipment or forklift releases gas you may not have taken into account when designing the protocol for the space. Plus these are issues that only become apparent with time. Vents get clogged up with dust and debris, and even tiny blocks mean that your employees are breathing in the wrong kind of air. If you can’t remember the last time you cleaned and checked the openings of the facility, then you’re putting yourself at major risk.

Clutter Cleanup

Clutter is unfortunately a fact of life, and it can be a frustrating experience. Maybe you don’t want to throw objects away, but you also don’t have anywhere to store them. Extra clutter gives your employees that many more ways to trip over, bump into or otherwise injure themselves. You will need to make difficult decisions about what to keep and what to throw away though. If you feel like you can’t bear to part with any of them, then you need to consider our next tip.

Proper Storage

Storage compartments needs to be stacked and ordered in such a way that nothing is spilling out and your items are able to be located quickly. This is much easier said than done, but it may just take a day to reorganize what you already have. Cold storage facilities come with a number of rules about keeping your materials and chemicals safe, so you need to at least understand the theory behind the rules. If worst comes to worse, you may want to buy more space for yourself – either within your facility or in a nearby storage locker.

While you can’t keep up with every development in technology, you can follow the overall trends to understand how it impacts your business. At the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI), doctors reviewed how it’s brought about a new economy, what it can mean for workers comp and how you prepare for the additional changes.

Regulation Unknown

The sharing economy only continues to grow, with 42 percent of people having used it and more than one if five people having profited from it. Technology gives workers new choices about how they can make money, and it gives older Americans a way to supplement their retirement funds. Applications like Lyft and AirBnB keeps people active and productive rather than sending out resumes into the ether. You may not currently make your living in an industry that uses contractors rather than full-time employees, but that could very well change based on the climate of workers and their demands. People today want more freedom, and there’s evidence to support that giving them flexibility will help, not hurt, profits. However, it poses certain threats to workers safety as well. It’s unclear how much responsibility the parent company bears when a worker is hurt on the clock. Certainly, it’s in the company’s best interests to deny that they bear any responsibility at all, but what does that mean for the worker then? As the government tries to cut through the red tape and current laws to make final decisions that you can be confident will stick, you would be smart to stay aware of how technology is influencing workers both in general and in your particular industry.

Monitoring in Safety

Employers should always have some idea of the way a worker performs their job, but sometimes the boss can’t catch small mistakes that add up over time. For example, let’s say you work in a warehouse where your subordinates need to lift boxes all day. Perhaps one worker is stretching his back just a bit too much every time he lifts one. He doesn’t notice his wrongful maneuver until he pulls a muscle 6 weeks later. Wearable technology is already letting companies know when an employees is in danger of hurting themselves from overexertion. It could continue to improve so employees can stop themselves from going too far in a variety of tasks. Cutting back on preventable injuries is just another way technology is mingling with even the most low-tech of jobs. A warehouse employee may not care about the software behind what he’s wearing, but he will care that doesn’t have to spend 6 weeks in a back brace on his couch.

Workers compensation cases touch many lives and many industries. Insurance employees, medical professionals, government officials, employees and employers all influence each other in different ways. And of course, a main motivator for everything in life is money. When people lose focus of this fact, it’s can lead them to be surprised about new developments. We’ll take you through how fee changes might affect you so you’re at least prepared should you start seeing any type of fishy behavior.

The Workers Compensation Research Institution held a conference where two doctors talked about their experience with fee changes. In the majority of states, they found that group health rates are lower than those of workers compensation. For the exact same services, the payer of workers comp is shelling out more than they would if the injured had gone through a group health service. Physicians across the board were found to have raised their prices if they weren’t charging as much as the fee schedule standard. It should be noted that most of these fees are some variation of Medicare fees (typically about 30 percent higher), but not every state operates this way. For example, Illinois works on billed charges, so much higher costs for the state than for group or Medicare.

In states where the fees are lower, there’s evidence to suggest that providers are simply classifying more injuries as work related so they can fall under the workers compensation price categories. This essentially helps balance out their net gain from offering care to workers. This means there’s a reason for them to lie regardless of exactly how the fee structures are made – they’ll simply be different reasons for each one. Because the decision rests with the doctors with little interference from outside sources, they can basically claim whatever they want.

As an employer, you should be aware of how your state structures the fees. Louisiana and California haven’t had their fees restructured for a while, and thus are quite low. Look to who has the incentive to lie. Obviously your employee has an incentive to lie that their back was injured at work rather than moving a sofa to the other side of their house, but the doctor may have motivation to side with the sofa-moving employee too. The study concluded that if reimbursement rates go up by 20 percent, then the doctor is 6 percent more likely to call your employee’s soft-tissue back injury a work-related injury. While that’s not certainly not a reason to panic that you’ll be inundated with fake claims, it is a reason to stay alert to how fee schedules are currently operating where you are so you can question and clarify if need be.