7 Tips for Smart, Data-Driven Risk Management in the Age of Workforce Transformation
Large-scale employee turnover in the wake of the post-pandemic Great Resignation rapidly transformed the workplace. As the resulting experience gap and an influx of first-year hires directly impacts on-the-job injury and long-term claim trends, C-suite executives are shifting focus to human capital management, leaving risk managers—who have always played a critical role in workplace safety—increasingly challenged to keep both new and tenured employees happy, healthy and engaged on the job.
In this era of unprecedented organizational change, smart workforce risk management can be your business’s greatest asset. Now more than ever, risk managers are being called on to tap into their analytic skills to uncover trends, glean insights and clearly communicate the connection between employee well-being and long-term business success.
Travelers is a carrier that understands the challenge of managing interconnected risk. By leveraging in-house expertise and an innovative proprietary e-CARMA® risk management platform, Travelers partners with customers to collect key data and analyze it to gain insights to understand the important story it’s telling.
Seven smart ways risk managers can harness the power of front-line data:
1. Establish a solid foundation of relevant data
Before you start analyzing your data, ensure that you’re gathering the right information.
Build custom data fields and organization codes that are relevant to your company. Standard notice-of-loss questions are a good place to start—but capturing inputs pertinent to your company’s unique infrastructure upfront can help ensure that your data is more useful, and your analysis more meaningful, down the road. As your business evolves, so should the questions your carrier asks at intake, so it’s important to revisit and reevaluate these forms periodically, too.
As dedicated consultants, Travelers aims to ensure you properly allocate losses back to the correct division, region, location or shift, and we hold ourselves accountable for code quality.
Engineering Success From the Start
We work with customers to understand their unique organization, coding system and data field testing requirements and ensure their data analysis initiatives are designed to yield the most meaningful insights in the most efficient way possible—from implementation into the future.
2. Be proactive about analyzing trends
Review your data regularly to identify trends and mitigate claim risks.
If you are a Travelers customer, you can think of your Travelers RMIS data consultant as an extension of your Risk Management team. Leverage the partnership and expertise throughout the year. Work together to monitor activity and create meaningful reports at regularly scheduled intervals. Take advantage of daily, weekly or monthly reports to uncover trends. Doing so will help you to effectively intervene and mitigate the impact of a claim. Once you identify and understand the risk, you can engage your claim and risk control consultants to take proactive corrective actions—such as assigning cases to the most suitable adjuster, increasing management involvement or leveraging medical professionals to adjust treatment plans—whenever there is need and opportunity.
Going Above and Beyond the (Annual) Call
Objective program evaluation. Custom reports. Competitive benchmarking. Expert analysis. Travelers RMIS consultants are proactive partners, available to help customers strategically leverage the tools and information they need to proactively monitor and manage risk all year long.
3. Normalize data with exposure information
Include exposure information in your analysis to improve data integrity and maximize forecasting potential.
Normalization helps eliminate anomalies that can make the extraction and examination of your data more complicated and, often, less meaningful. Among its many advantages are easier maintenance, faster search and less null or redundant values to muddy the waters. Including exposure information—like payroll and hours worked—ensures that data remains relative to the unique organizational and operational environment of your workplace so you can use it to identify claim trends and predict outcomes more efficiently and effectively.
Easy, Effective Exposure Data Integration
Our e-CARMA platform allows you to upload exposure information such as head count, payroll, hours worked and miles driven—which can help your organization to proactively identify and manage increasingly complex and interconnected risks.
4. Dig deeper for key performance indicators (KPIs)
Don’t settle for surface-level explanations—lift the layers to uncover key KPIs affecting claim outcomes.
While measuring claim management success in terms of dollars spent is important, you should also consider qualitative and competitive benchmarks that can equally affect outcomes. Identifying the right KPIs will help you understand, analyze, track, measure and improve inefficiencies in your workers comp handling process in ways that can increase employee satisfaction and better protect your business’s bottom line. Look beyond the basic financial benchmarks and consider how metrics like reporting lag, type of injury, tenure and representation time frame impact claim success. Knowing how your claim outcomes compare within your industry is important, too—so ask your data consultant for book, peer or state reports to include in your analysis.
5. Evaluate payment types to track spending
Know where your claim dollars are being spent to help mitigate rising claim costs.
Inflation is increasing indemnity and medical costs, escalating the financial impact of workers comp claims on businesses. Case management data can be an invaluable tool to mitigate the impact. Leverage payment type reports to reveal where your money is being spent and highlight trends over time. Correlating claim costs with the involvement of lost time wages or medical, physical therapy, attorney and investigative services in each case can help your business better allocate its resources and focus on the interventions that will be most impactful in its efforts to reduce the impact of a loss.
6. Review online communication usage data by injured employees
Leverage communications platform data to improve employee engagement and satisfaction through the claim process.
Behind every claim is a human being with unique needs, thoughts and feelings. Case management platforms, like Travelers’ MyTravelers® experience, help companies connect with injured employees so they feel more cared for through their recovery, which may shorten return-to-work time, reduce overall cost and protect your reputation as a desirable employer.
Humanizing the Claim Experience
Engaging employees throughout the claims process can improve outcomes. Our MyTravelers® platform offers injured workers access to status updates, payment information and secure messaging, while our e-CARMA solution mines data to help employers identify low usage and deploy actionable strategies to increase engagement.
7. Collaborate with peers and partners
Utilize internal and external resources to optimize your data analysis and case management strategies.
Colleagues in and outside your organization can offer a broader view of your risk management approach. Identify internal resources who may have a unique perspective, like floor supervisors, safety managers and nurse practitioners. Leverage data from all available sources, including consultants, health and safety, finance and human resources teams. Solicit insights regarding employee engagement, corporate culture and post-injury management practices to share with your RMIS data consultants who can help identify gaps and inefficiencies in your processes, as well as make suggestions for how to improve them. The more input you have, the better case you can make to leadership when advocating for organizational and operational changes that may positively impact claim outcomes.
Data-driven risk mitigation with e-CARMA
Travelers' industry-leading risk management information system
At Travelers, we believe that data is meaningless if you don’t understand the story it’s telling. That's why we developed e-CARMA with one goal in mind — to give risk managers unparalleled access to data trends and analysis that evolves with their company’s needs. Our innovative RMIS solution includes:
200+ million data points to inform services, training, benchmarking and customer risk awareness.
Dedicated RMIS consultants to help identify and share trends and insights most relevant to your organization.
Data integration and integrity assurance to evaluate all facets of your risk management program, including pre-to-post-injury outcomes.
Multifactor authentication and secured app access to protect your data and network from unauthorized use.
To learn more about how we can help optimize your claim outcomes, contact the Travelers representative in your region.
