Effective worksite enforcement plays an important role in the fight against illegal immigration and in protecting our homeland. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has developed a comprehensive worksite enforcement strategy that promotes national security, protects critical infrastructure, and ensures fair labor standards. To learn more read the advisory on the ICE Web site.
I’m a big fan of audio learning programs. I recently listened to an interview with Vic Conant of Nightingale-Conant talking about the shift in their program sales. In the 80s and 90s, program sales were dominated by corporate names like Tom Peters and Warren Bennis. Since the early 2000s, there’s been a significant shift to programs for those wanting to be entrepreneurs and in charge of their own destiny. This whole trend of “Brand You” has been going on for more than a decade now, posing a significant challenge for today’s companies. With the aging and shrinking workforce, we’re going to have less available talent. Given future economic uncertainty, more and more of the remaining available talent will opt to work for themselves. The question becomes this: What can we offer the best and brightest that will convince them it’s in their best interest to work for us rather than for themselves?
Here are some of the reasons why many of the best want to work for themselves:
- The perception of greater financial security. This holds true even though most start-up businesses fail.
- Control over where their career is going.
- The ability to create a flexible work experience.
- Working only with people they choose to.
- The potential for full creativity.
- A lack of office politics, nepotism, or complaints about the expense report.
- Access to Internet, franchising, network marketing, and software tools that make it easier to work for yourself than ever before.
In a sense, these workers are willing to swap the security of a paycheck for the lure of personal and financial freedom.
To help the employer’s cause, I’d recommend these guidelines:
- Open your books. Treat employees like owners. Look at The Great Game of Business.
- Work with them to map out their careers.
- Provide flexibility: Flexible hours, reduced hours, job sharing, telecommuting, etc.
- Let them provide input on who comes on the team. HR That Works users should see the Co-Employee Applicant Appraisal Form.
- Give them permission to be creative. In fact, require them to give monthly suggestions on how they can do their job better or differently. See the Employee Suggestion Form.
- Reduce the drama. No whiners, no jerks. Otherwise, all you end up with are drama kings and queens. Hire and promote based on competencies and don’t put up with irresponsibility.
- Use today’s technologies to help employees increase their productivity — and pay!
As safety professionals know — but unfortunately, many employees don’t — lockout/tagout (LOTO) procedures are designed to keep workers safe while servicing and maintaining machinery or other energized systems.
Unintentional equipment startup accidents injure some 50,000 workers a year and kill 120 people. LOTO is not only good practice; it’s the law (29 CFR 1910.147). Even with the law in place, LOTO remains one of OSHA’s most violated standards, and these violations are expensive.
A leading safety resources Web site posted these “Fatal 5” main causes of LOTO-preventable injuries:
- Failure to stop equipment. Some workers value productivity above all else. That’s normally a good thing, but not in this case. Others feel that their age or long experience with the equipment lets them work on it without “taking the trouble” to safeguard it properly. Either attitude can lead to the same, possibly deadly, result.
- Failure to disconnect from the power source. In the case of electrical equipment, some workers feel that simply operating the on/off switch is all it takes to be safe. This ignores the fact that the switch might be defective or that power might find its way through a short circuit or other source — until they’re shocked to learn otherwise.
- Failure to drain residual energy. Ask workers why TV sets carry a warning about trying to open the case even if the device is disconnected. You know, and they should, that it’s because many electrical devices store power in a capacitor or battery. Even with the plug out, the risk of shock remains. Employees need to expand this concept to other kinds of devices. A compressed spring, hot pipe, pressurized tank, or even a heavy object hanging overhead, also represent energy that continues to exist, even when the initial source of this energy is disconnected. To be safe, all forms of stored energy must be completely blocked or released.
- Accidental restart of machinery. Even if one employee knows to shut down equipment before working on it, others might not. All too many unknowing workers have injured their fellow workers by restarting machines being worked on.
- Failure to clear work areas before restarting. Restarting machinery must be handled with as much care as shutting it down and locking it out. A repair tool left in the works to fly out, or a restart while a co-worker remains in the path of danger represent hazards as significant as not locking out the machine at all.
Our risk management specialists would be happy to review your LOTO program. Just give us a call.
They might not be exciting or high tech, but safety signs in the workplace can be worth their weight in gold! Says a recent article on businessknowledgesource.com: “The importance of workplace safety signs can’t be stressed enough. [If properly designed and used] … signs can overcome a number of losses due to language barriers, reading abilities, and insufficient work experience. Wherever there’s need for general instruction, there should be a safety sign to help avoid potential injury.”
Of course, even the best signs won’t help if poorly designed or improperly used. Although OSHA uses ANSI standards to specify the design of such common signs as EXIT or CAUTION, there’s no way to regulate how every sign will be made and used.
An effective safety signage program should meet these standards:
- Visibility. It sounds basic, but signs can’t do any good if they’re not visible. There are plenty of reasons they might not be. Check your break room bulletin board. Is one sign plastered over others? Are the signs so old they’re now the color of the Declaration of Independence? Are they hidden in corners or in hard-to-reach places on the equipment they’re designed to explain? To enhance visibility, especially from a distance, choose such contrasting color choices as yellow on black and put borders around every sign.
- Noticeability. Qualities that make a sign stand out include shape and color; most people recognize a “stop” or “yield” sign without even reading it. Perpendicular signs are among the most noticeable, which is one reason that they’re used by stores seeking to stand out in a streetscape, and why they can be useful in identifying areas of special hazard.
- Legibility. One reason it’s hard to read government regulations as published in the Federal Register is the size and grayness of the type. In the same way, type size can make important safety signs stand out more, as does spacing between words and individual letters. Printing a sign’s message in a second color improves retention of the message by 82%.
- Durability. Signs need to survive the environment in which they’re placed. High heat, humidity, or corrosives can wilt or stain a sign beyond recognition. Don’t use cardboard when sheet metal is called for.
Even if your signs meet all these criteria, OSHA still requires that they be posted and maintained properly, either by you or by the supervisors of the areas involved. That leads to the classic compliance issue of how to make sure that all regulations are observed when you can’t be everywhere at once to check.
If you’re like most business owners or managers, you spend your days (and probably nights, too) working on and thinking about ways to reduce risk in your workplace. Unfortunately, all of it can come to naught without one thing your workers need to develop: A sense of safety awareness.
Without it, workers won’t wear their personal protective equipment (PPE), or won’t wear it properly. They won’t make full use of the safety features built into their equipment. And they won’t observe basic rules, such as those of good housekeeping, that can prevent accidents. Without safety awareness, workers might be thinking about production, their compensation, or tonight’s softball game — but not about safety on the job.
Here are four ways to instill safety awareness in your workplace.
- Develop a Safety Manual. This book given to new workers on day one, says NIFB, should “pool safety information from department managers, equipment and tool manufacturers, and workplace safety experts,” and should include “startup and lockdown procedures, types of activity to avoid at work, and proper attire for operating equipment.”
- Name a Safety Champion. Appoint one employee in each department or work area to research and report on safety at regular safety or department meetings. It’s often amazing how workers take to this responsibility. In one organization the safety coordinator, as he’s called, subscribes to safety magazines and continually contacts safety organizations to bring his co-workers the best and latest information. The gratitude he receives from colleagues is his only payment for this work.
- Hold a Safety Event. Encourage employees to plan and carry out safety demonstrations or create exhibits for these events, which can be either freestanding or part of larger company gatherings. This as an ideal time to hold contests or distribute safety awards. You can also invite guest speakers from vendors or safety or trade associations.
- Build Safety into Employee Communications. Every employee contact, from daily e-mails to paycheck stuffers to newsletters, should stress workplace safety. In fact, the more you focus on safety, the more it will become a core value for your organization. Don’t forget posters, and how to display them properly. This means locating safety messages so they’re not lost in a sea of EEOC and Wage and Hour announcements. Make sure that these messages get priority placement in work areas and aren’t covered by other postings as time passes.
For guidelines on creating and nurturing a sense of safety awareness in your workforce that can reduce the risk of accident or injury (and keep your insurance premiums under control), feel free to get in touch with one of our risk management professionals.
Comprehensive wellness programs not only improve employees’ health — they also can slow the rate of an employer’s health care cost increases. This results in a positive return on an employer’s investment in the wellness initiative. According to a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, employers can save $1.65 in health care costs for every dollar spent on a comprehensive employee wellness program.
The study followed participants in a wellness program sponsored by health insurance provider Highmark for its own employees. The wellness initiative was launched in 2002 and offered the following free of charge to employees (some program components were not included initially but were added in later years): Health risk assessments; online, onsite and/or individual programs on nutrition, weight and stress management, and tobacco cessation; screenings for cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure levels; campaigns to increase fitness awareness; disease management initiatives; and (at some locations) onsite fitness centers. Wellness program expenses averaged $139 per employee per year.
In order to assess the impact of the wellness program, participants were matched to nonparticipants based on gender, age, 2001 medical expenses, claims-based evidence of heart disease and diabetes, and certain predictive morbidity scores. For both participants and nonparticipants, individuals with $100,000 or more in annual health care costs were excluded.
Health care expenditures grew more slowly 2001 through 2005 for wellness program participants than for nonparticipants. Specifically, estimates of health care expenses per person per year were $176 lower for participants, and inpatient expenses were $182 lower. Over the four-year period, during which the wellness program cost Highmark just over $808,000, more than an estimated $1.3 million in health care cost savings were gained. This translates to a return on investment of $1.65 for every dollar the employer spent on the wellness initiatives.
The study also examined whether the wellness program participants made greater use of preventive services available through the health plan. In comparing data from the year before the wellness program launched and the next year, preventive visit screening rates increased from 56% to 60% for employees who completed a health risk assessment (HRA), from 57% to 60% for employees who completed an HRA and also participated in an online, group or individual wellness program component, and from 62% to 64% for employees who took an HRA and also used a fitness center. For nonparticipants, use of health plan preventive services remained unchanged at 55% during the comparison years. As a further measure of the impact of the wellness program on use of health plan preventive services, the study found that preventive care visits accounted for 16.5% of total health plan expenditures for wellness program participants, compared with 13.5% for nonparticipants.
Because the analysis only considered health care cost savings, the authors note that, “This savings estimate is most likely an underestimate of benefit as it does not include savings realized from improved productivity or reduced absenteeism or presenteeism.” They go on to cite other studies that found wellness program participants were absent a third- to a half-day less in the year following participation in a wellness program, and that wellness program participants have higher morale, productivity, job satisfaction and overall health and fitness levels than nonparticipants.
Though the Highmark initiative might be more comprehensive than many employers are willing or able to do, the study does show that wellness programs return the investment employers make in them, in financially measurable ways and in intangibles like a happier, more committed and productive workforce.
As an employer, you spend a significant amount of money providing your employees with an attractive benefits package. It is a necessity if you’re in a competitive industry where you need to find and retain top talent. But do your employees appreciate your investment? Do they have any idea how much you spend to provide their benefits package?
If your workplace is like most, the answer is probably no. Surveys on employee attitudes toward their benefits reveal that most vastly underestimate the amount their employers spend. Studies also show that employee attitudes toward their benefits packages tend to be negative, focusing on focusing on rising premiums and cost-sharing methods rather than employer contributions.
TELLING YOUR STORY
Generally, it’s not that employees are ungrateful; it’s that they truly don’t realize how much you pay to provide benefits. How can you tell your story so that employees appreciate their benefits? There are a number of ways to accomplish this, and it’s a worthwhile undertaking since you need a return on your considerable investment. Here are low or no-cost tips that may help:
- Provide a total pay statement: When employees think about their compensation, they typically only consider their gross pay. However, as you know, benefits make up a large part of the full amount you pay to keep them on board. You can spell out the details in a total pay statement, which is typically a chart illustrating the value of the total compensation and breaking it down into its various parts. You can include other employee perks you offer, such as tuition reimbursement, licensure fees you pay, etc. There are companies that provide custom total pay statements, or you can use a spreadsheet application to generate them yourself.
- Make costs a part of benefits education: Many businesses provide educational meetings about employee benefits during new-hire orientation or annual benefits enrollment. This is a perfect opportunity to emphasize the value of the benefits package and to underscore the fact that it is part of the employees’ total compensation. If your insurance carrier conducts employee training on benefits, you can ask your representative about the possibility of mentioning the total cost and the employer portion.
- Add free or low-cost perks: You might also consider adding voluntary benefits or perks such as pet insurance, discounts on gym memberships, community service days or other incentives to help employees see the overall value of their relationship with your company. Sometimes employees focus on quantity, so having additional choices — even ones that are 100% employee paid — can result in a greater level of appreciation. Your insurance broker may have suggestions if you’re ready to explore this option.
A TOKEN OF APPRECIATION
If your employees don’t appreciate their total compensation, you can’t fully capitalize on your investment in benefits as the important motivational tool it can be. It pays to take a second look at how your employees perceive their benefits. Remember, improving their perception can be relatively inexpensive — and well worth the effort.
During the past 20-plus years, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued, in dribs and drabs, regulations, notices and other guidance on Sec. 125 cafeteria plans. In proposed regulations effective in general for 2009 plan years, the IRS now has consolidated its cafeteria plan guidance, along with clarifying and elaborating on various cafeteria plan issues. The regulations are lengthy — 124 pages — so in this article we highlight some of the points that are most significant for employers that offer some type of cafeteria plan.
Keep in mind that the term “cafeteria plan” can encompass arrangements as simple as premium-only plans or flexible spending accounts (FSAs), those as elaborate as choice-making plans with employer credits and a wide selection of benefits, or something in between. These requirements for cafeteria plans apply to any of these types of arrangements.
The cafeteria plan must be in writing, and the plan must be operated in accordance with the written plan terms. The regulations specify all that must be included in the written plan document. Remember that the requirement that the plan be in writing applies to all types of cafeteria plans, even premium-only plans.
All participants in a cafeteria plan must be employees, which the regulations define to include common-law employees, leased employees and full-time insurance salespeople. Former employees, including laid-off employees and retirees, may participate, but the plan cannot be maintained predominantly for them. Spouses and dependents may receive benefits under the cafeteria plan, but cannot “participate” in the plan. Self-employed individuals, including sole proprietors, partners, directors and 2% shareholders in Subchapter S corporations, are not considered employees and thus may not participate in a cafeteria plan, but they could sponsor a plan for employees.
The regulations specify the kinds of benefits that can be included in a cafeteria plan. Of note:
- If Group-Term Life insurance is offered, employers must use Table I as the exclusive method of computing the cost of such coverage in excess of $50,000 (which is includible in an employee’s income). This provision is effective immediately.
- Individual Health insurance premiums, as well as an employee’s or former employee’s COBRA premiums, can be paid through a cafeteria plan (but not through an FSA).
- Among benefits defined as nonqualified (and a plan that offers nonqualified benefits is not considered a cafeteria plan) are contributions to Archer medical savings accounts, contributions to health reimbursement arrangements, Group Term Life insurance for spouses or dependent children, and elective deferrals to Sec. 403(b) plans.
- A change in plan year, or a short plan year (less than 12 months), is only permitted for a valid business purpose.
- Though a cafeteria plan may not provide for deferred compensation, the regulations specify certain types of plan features that are not considered deferred compensation, such as a Long-Term Disability policy paying benefits for more than one year, certain two-year lock-in vision and dental policies, and certain advance payments for orthodontia.
- Though cafeteria plan elections generally are irrevocable (other than for changes in status or life events), the regulations permit employees to prospectively elect, revoke or change salary reduction elections for HSA contributions at any time during the plan year with respect to salary that has not become currently available at the time of the election. The regulations also permit automatic default elections for employees who fail to actively elect, and they permit new employees to make elections within 30 days of hire that are retroactive to the date of hire.
- Health FSAs may be established for limited purposes, such as an HSA-compatible limited-purpose health FSA or a post-deductible health FSA. Also, an employer can limit FSA enrollment to employees who participate in the health plan. A dependent care FSA may allow terminated employees to spend down their account through the end of the plan year. Employers can retain FSA forfeitures, use them to defray administrative expenses, or allocate them to participants.
- The regulations provide guidance on cafeteria plan nondiscrimination tests, define several key terms (including highly compensated individual, 5% shareholder, key employee and compensation), and specify that nondiscrimination testing must be performed on the last day of the plan year. They also create a nondiscrimination testing safe harbor for premium-only plans.
With this consolidated package of guidance for cafeteria plans, the IRS is likely to take enforcement more seriously. Now would be a good time to go through your cafeteria plan written document and administrative procedure and check for any compliance issues. Call us. We can help.
You’ve just taken a new job, and many of your tasks involve lifting heavy objects. If you’ve never done much lifting in the past, you need to remember an important rule. Until you become accustomed to lifting, you should take frequent breaks during the workday to avoid serious injury.
When you are inexperienced at lifting, your back muscles experience fatigue after only a short period of time. When this happens, the body has a natural tendency to become rigid in the area experiencing pain and that muscle group can no longer be used. You try to compensate by lifting with other muscle groups that don’t hurt so that you can complete the task.
Although this seems like the right course of action, it creates a series of negative consequences that could cause you to sustain a major injury. The first of these consequences results from the tensing itself. Tense muscles prevent proper blood flow, which deprives your muscles of the oxygen they need to sustain their repeated action.
The second negative consequence derives from using different muscles to lift. Although this might lessen your pain at first, it increases the stress on the joints and spine. The back muscles begin to fight the abdominal muscles until they both eventually contract. That simultaneous contraction of both sets of muscles creates a kind of “seesaw,” with each muscle group pulling from either end while your spine is caught in the middle. This not only provides an additional source of pain, but also increases risk of serious injury.
When you take a lunch break of a half-hour or more, you give your muscles the time they need to recover from the morning’s exertion. However, once you start working again, the amount of oxygen your muscles need in order to complete the same amount of work increases significantly. That requirement will keep increasing during the afternoon. That’s because your muscles are becoming fatigued much quicker during the afternoon, having already been exerted to complete the morning tasks. Taking breaks throughout the day gives your muscles the opportunity to replenish the oxygen they need, which helps counteract the risk of back injury. This is especially important at the end of the day when muscles are most vulnerable.
The necessity of taking frequent rest breaks can’t be stressed enough because on-the-job back injuries from heavy lifting are widespread. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2002, there were more than 345,000 back injuries requiring employees to take time away from work. A 2004 study by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital found that back pain results in over 100 million lost workdays per year. But beyond the time lost from work, which could mean trying to manage financially on disability income rather than your regular salary, there is also the possibility of a permanent injury that could end your work career and leave you unable to enjoy activities with family and friends. Why would you risk such a possibility when preventing it so simple?
As if construction work was not hazardous enough, when summer arrives and brings record temperatures, workers must take extra precautions to prevent heat-related illnesses. Although it might be difficult to escape the heat during a hot summer day, preventing heat stress is possible. The key is taking action before it becomes a problem.
Preventing heat stress among your workers starts with proper awareness, and that starts the day an employee is hired. As part of your orientation, educate new hires on the various types of heat stress, including heat exhaustion, heat cramps and heat stroke. You should also encourage your workers to look for the warning signs of heat-related illness for themselves and their colleagues, possibly by instituting a formal buddy system.
In addition to being on the lookout for usual signs of heat stress — headaches, dizziness, weakness, mood changes, queasiness, vomiting, pale and clammy skin and fainting — workers should know where to get help when a co-worker is suffering from heat stress.
Education about heat stress must be consistent and continue after orientation, otherwise workers might not remember everything they were taught. Furthermore, everyone on a job site should be knowledgeable about the hazards of heat stress. Training should not be limited to hourly employees, but should also be required for foremen, supervisors and subcontractors.
Many construction workers ignore the seriousness of heat stress. This is why it’s important that supervisors start each day by reminding workers how to protect themselves from the heat.
If at all possible, try to schedule workdays around the sun’s peak times. Start projects early in the day before the sun peaks, and if forced to work into the afternoon, encourage frequent breaks.
Certain types of personal protective equipment can make the summer months more bearable for outdoor workers. For example, dark-colored safety glasses offer more protection from the glare of the sun than do light-colored glasses; full-brimmed hardhats provide better coverage than front-brimmed hats; and light-colored clothes with sleeves and a collar offer additional sun protection. You could also hand out sunscreen and encourage it to be liberally applied throughout the day.
Prevention and awareness are the keys to developing heat stress prevention policies. But the most important thing you can do is to not wait for something to happen before taking action.
