Health & Safety – a profit centre?

Have you ever wondered if health and safety could be a profit centre in a business?

The short answer is yes!

ACC provides a powerful means to turn compliance into profit.

Huh?

The reality is that very few people link health and safety with ACC. I find that interesting as a workplace claim under ACC can only happen if there has been a failing in health and safety. These two areas are so intertwined that it is remiss of us not to cover them in the same sentence.

If that isn’t good enough reason to align the two, businesses who are in the ACC Experience Rating scheme (of which there are 15,000), pay penalties on their ACC levies when they have workers injured at work. Depending on the size of the business, penalties can be as high as 100% and on the flip side, discounts can be as high as 50%. A penalty lasts for three years and if you have a fatality, regardless of whether you are prosecuted, you will get an automatic 30% death penalty… sorry, I mean fatality loading.

In 16 years of managing ACC and health and safety, I am yet to meet one business who enjoys paying their ACC invoice. Let's face it, most of us don’t even know what we are paying for. The invoice turns up, we say a few swear words, hop into a payment plan and that’s it.

Folks, news flash. ACC is not a tax. It is an insurance for employers which just happens to be compulsory. As an insurance, we can lower our risk and pay less.

The health and safety team is best place to manage this risk as their job is to prevent incidents and accidents. Do they even know whether the business is in a discount or penalty space? Does anyone know in the business?

If the business is not in the discount space, it is gifting ACC money. Albeit anecdotal, claim duration is driven more by bad process than the severity of the injury. There are several very basic and powerful things you can introduce by way of objectives.

1. 100% match between what comes up in your MyACC versus internal incident reports (and yes, most employers have a mismatch)

2. The time delay between when the worker gets help and states when the injury happens should be no more than 3 days. Check your MyACC under the claims tab… you will be surprised and not in a good way at the delay some of your claims have.

3. Set a target for your Experience Rating profile – if you are in a penalty space, you want to reduce it by perhaps 20%. It is doable, that I promise. Remember, the maximum discount is up to 50%.

Please note that with your ACC levies, your starting point is the maximum discount… any claim erodes the discount and then turns into a penalty. So, if you see a 0% on your invoice, sorry team, you have lost a sizeable discount.

It stands to reason, the best claim management is not having any claims to start with. Our focus is to align both your health and safety and your ACC risk and in doing so, we can turn your compliance into a profit centre.

The financial pain is real. The financial benefit is also real.