How can a staffing agency reduce its workers’ comp insurance costs? With workers’ compensation directly affecting profits, that question keeps staffing CEOs up at night. As an agent with expertise in staffing liability insurance, you can offer these clients practical advice on keeping their workers’ comp premiums low. In addition to boosting profit margins, these steps can reduce injuries, improve worker morale and solidify employee retention.
Seek Safety-Conscious Employees
Hiring employees with a proven safety-minded attitude can head off the mishaps that drive workers’ comp claims. Your staffing agency clients can implement these recruiting measures to improve the odds of start-to-finish safe placements:
- Require references from every applicant.
- Perform background checks consistent with state law.
- Take note of applicants who quit a previous job without giving notice.
- Schedule at least one face-to-face interview.
Even with stellar references, it pays to test applicants’ proficiency and arrange refresher training if necessary.
Perform Workplace Due Diligence
The other side in the safety equation is the workplace where your staffing clients will place their employees. Nearly every staffing agency carefully reads a prospective client’s written safety policy, but not all follow through with these additional measures:
- Formulate an Agency Safety Policy: Though time-consuming, this effort provides a consistent benchmark for evaluating a prospect’s safety practices.
- Perform a Pre-Placement Inspection: Before signing a contract, arrange a comprehensive walkthrough of the prospective client’s workplace.
- Say No: Though difficult, staffing agencies must adhere to their in-house workplace safety standards and decline contracts with prospects unwilling to measure up.
- Schedule Follow-up Inspections: Make periodic visits to the client’s workplace and survey agency employees to assess compliance with the safety policy.
Beyond the measurable impact on workers’ comp claims, your staffing clients’ efforts will demonstrate a tangible commitment to their employees’ well-being and can aid worker retention.
Take Care With Classifications
Wrongly classified employees can trigger higher than necessary premiums or underpayment penalties at the year-end audit. Doing business in more than one state multiplies this headache for your staffing clients. Nonetheless, performing painstaking individual classifications for employees with each placement reduces workers’ comp costs. Health care staffers with extensive skillsets deserve particular attention, as these versatile workers may land in varied categories for each of their placements in a fiscal year.
Learn From Every Claim
Well-managed staffing agencies coordinate claims efficiently and look after their employees’ welfare. Nonetheless, even some elite agencies neglect the essential final step in the claims process cycle: evaluation. A critical examination of the events leading to the claim may reveal correctable flaws in the agency’s recruitment, training or workplace inspection protocols.
The staffing agencies that commit to these efforts can outperform their competitors. Augmenting your staffing liability insurance services with risk reduction guidance can make these companies long-term clients.
About World Wide Specialty Programs
For the last 50 years, World Wide Specialty Programs has dedicated itself to providing the optimal products and solutions for the staffing industry. As the only insurance firm to be an ASA commercial liability partner, we are committed to that partnership and to using our knowledge of the industry to provide staffing firms with the best possible coverage. For more information about Staffing Professional Liability Insurance or any other coverage, we have available to protect your staffing business, give us a call at (877) 256-0468 to speak with one of our representatives.