How Mitigation Services Work for Contractors

Rick Keegan, president of the Construction Business Unit at Travelers says that construction specialists must help contractors understand that the changing labor force dynamics require proactive risk management to ensure the potential for cost and adverse experience is mitigated.

“A lot of contractors are just highly focused on finding skilled labor, which of course is a challenge,” he said. “What we want to do is ensure that the focus on risk management continues as they assimilate those new workers into the industry.”

According to Keegan, peer review systems that allow contractors to compare the safety and risk management controls they have in place to industry peers and then identify possible areas for improvement can be useful. “We can even break it down by industry segment and then by size of contractor. It would allow a street and road contractor at a certain revenue threshold to look at other street and road contractors of the same size and see what they do for things like pre-employment screening, MVR, mandatory drug testing, contractual risk transfer controls, and compare with the practices of others.”

Construction specialty agents can also offer help in mitigating loss exposures in a changing labor force climate.

Matt Chase, executive vice president and head of the construction practice for Pasadena, Calif.-based Bolton & Co., says the construction sector has seen a large spike in soft tissue injuries for workers’ compensation over the past 10 years. But loss control programs such as the “warm up” or “stretching” programs offered through Bolton’s construction practice have helped to change that trend for some contractors.

“The sophisticated clients are proactively implementing stretch programs and we’re helping them with that,” Chase said. “Our in-house loss control helps build that plan for them. We take pictures of the employees wearing their company gear, their shirt and their hardhat, and we put posters around the office and the job sites of these actual employees performing the stretches with directions on how to properly do the stretch.”

Chase says a simple five minute stretching period, similar to what athletes might do prior to a sport, makes a huge difference in reducing construction worker injuries.

For clients that have been doing the warm-up program for a couple of years, Chase has seen a noticeable dip in soft tissue injuries. “The hard part is getting buy-in from the workforce.”

Chase advises his clients that any dollar they spend in safety is going to be returned back three times between lost worker time and in insurance premiums. “But they have to actually use and implement the program.”