CARLSBAD, California — Getting a company’s executives to support a return-to-work program that effectively puts injured workers on light duty in-house is a numbers game, according to workers comp leader who in 2021 helped create such a program for a large transportation company.
Char Duffy, who ran the workers compensation program for Yellow Corp. Inc. before the Overland Park, Kansas-based company closed in 2023, said getting executives to listen involved spread sheets and charts: showing decision makers how much money they are losing by having injured workers out of work and how much a program could save them is key.
Presenting at the Workers’ Compensation & Risk Conference on Thursday, Ms. Duffy said “where I got their attention was that column of red,” regarding the company’s losses when it came to having injured workers out on temporary total disability, and other factors that affected claims. Yellow employed 30,000 workers.
In the first year, she was able to save the company $10 million by offering injured trucking employees the opportunity to work in the nonprofit sector: creating greeting cards for the military and doing so on-site. The changes implemented affected several parts of the work comp program at Yellow Corp., from reducing litigation rates – accounting for $3.3 million in savings over one year – to reducing lost days on new claims, accounting for $1.1 million in savings.
Presenting the company’s results on changes to its workers comp program implemented over one year, Ms. Duffy said companies often ignore how effective return-to-work, light-duty programs can be for the company’s bottom line. “They see workers comp as a sunk cost that they just have to pay,” she said.
Working with the program at Yellow, Christine Nickloes, Olde West Chester, Ohio-based operations manager at human resources consultant Sheakley Group Inc., said running statistics by executives also helps with buy-in: “the longer someone is off work, the chances of them coming back to work diminishes every day. Within six months, only 50% of your lost-time claimants will return to work. If they’re out for one year, it reduces down to 10%.”
Getting unions involved was also a factor, Ms. Duffy said, adding that the greatest challenge was that union leaders wanted workers engaged in “meaningful work.” Many of the workers had been in the military prior, so the nonprofit work spoke to them, she said.