Margaret Spence explains how mishandled workers' compensation settlements backfire. When companies reward injury with easy money or cushy roles, other workers notice and file claims too, tanking morale and loyalty. Effective return-to-work programs that give injured employees meaningful tasks until they recover protect both culture and the bottom line.
If you are okay with saying to every injured employee, "Go home and stay there," what are you setting up the rest of your workforce to do? Okay, if you bring the employee back to work and you put them in the corner and they're counting paperclips, they're not doing productive work. Now you have the rest of your staff looking at this injured worker saying, he's got a cushy job, I want that job. So if you don't create a return to work program that is effective, you can't just, just bring people back to work. Okay, you have to say, okay, what can the employee do? Where can we put them? Where can they be most effective until they're able to go back to their original work area? But it's a tone that you set throughout your organization. One of the things that I say to employers is this: if you settle every claim, all you're setting yourself up for is for the next person to walk in the door— word's out on the street— If you come to work for XYZ Company, you're gonna get a check. And so that's the kind of employee you attract. You attract employees who know that if they come to work for you, you have no system in place, they can game the system, and now the cycle starts all over again. So beyond the fact of cost, it has to do with the environment, the work environment that you're creating. And as much as we say when we settle claims, that there's, you know, confidentiality, nobody will talk about their settlement. That's not true. They're friends, they're buddies. And envision this: I'm working next to you on an assembly line. You get injured and I'm still working every day. I see you driving a brand new car a couple weeks later. I see you driving— your, your wife has a brand new car because you've you settled your workers' comp claim and now you're throwing money around left and right. I'm thinking to myself, are you kidding? Why am I doing this? So you, you affect loyalty to the company, you affect morale, and you don't create a continuity for other employees. So that's the negative side. It's not always about the cost.
