I've got the pre-speech jitters -- again! Am en route to Phoenix to serve as keynote speaker for the National Council of Self-Insurers conference. I'll be talking about the new ACOEM* Guideline on Preventing Needless Work Disability by Helping People Stay Employed and Webility's 60 Summits Project. The NCSI audience will be mostly executives and managers who are responsible for their company's self-insured workers' compensation programs. Since companies have to be pretty large to self-insure, they tend to hire people who are work comp experts. Thus, this audience will be "system savvy." I wonder if they're so savvy about the status quo that they won't be attracted to my story about a potentially brighter future.
Something's been missing in both workers' comp and disability benefits systems: a detailed vision of how the system ought to work -- what ought to happen from the employee's point of view as well as the employer's. Mostly the participants in these systems talk about what is wrong or what we don't want to have happen. Remember how shocked you were when people first told you about how the "comp system" works? --- the way that people's faces hardened and that cynical note in their voice? Today, when you tell people you meet that you do a lot of work in the workers' comp or disability benefits system, do they say: "Gee, that's so cool; I wish I could do that!"? Many people think of these systems as boring and beaucratic, or corrupt and adversarial, or sleazy or unattractive, right?
So, just for a shocker to get people thinking differently, I'm going to invite the NCSI audience to play with this idea: "What would a first class workers' comp system look like?" By first class, I mean a system that is the equivalent of Nordstrom or LLBean for retail, the Four Seasons or the Ritz Carlton for hotels, or BMW or Mercedes Benz for cars.
Key point: Nordstrom, the Ritz, and BMW believe that if they give people a wonderful product and fabulous service, they'll want to buy more and keep coming back. In the game we'll be playing at NCIS ("First Class Comp"), the assertion is that if we give people fabulous service, they'll want to buy LESS because we'll meet their needs so completely and appropriately. Injured/ill employees will stop "buying" unnecessary and inappropriate medical care, and both injured/ill employers and their employers will stop "buying" unnecessary time away from work.
Second key point: This is NOT JUST about being polite to injured workers' and their supervisors -- though that's part of it. And it is CERTAINLY NOT about catering to their every whim and demand. We're talking about starting from the position that workers and their supervisors are each important individuals who powerfully influence the outcome, and that we are being curious about how they see the situation, earning their trust, engaging them in the search for solutions, and really meeting their legitimate needs.
When we're delivering "First Class Comp", we'll have shifted the focus to include more than simply watching what the worker does and how the employer responds and then deciding what that means for our workers' compensation or disability benefits claim. We will now be planning ahead, anticipating people's needs and reactions, focusing on the whole situation created by the worker's injury or illness, envisioning the realistic best outcome given the circumstances, and then using best practices strategies and protocols to drive the situation towards that optimal resolution.
The Guideline and The 60 Summits Project are designed to build a widely-shared positive vision of how the stay-at-work and return-to-work process could work. Will that appeal to the NCSI audience? Will the blueprint for improvement that the Guideline lays out make sense -- and lead them to take action? Will the grass-roots approach of the 60 Summits Project strike them as hopelessly naive, or as a good way to get action going in their own company, community and state? Exactly how cynical and resigned are they?
My goal is to leave the NCIS meeting having had at least 25 conversations with companies who are intrigued by The 60 Summits Project and say they want to get involved. (Of course, I also hope some employers will be curious about how Webility's training and consulting services might assist them internally.) To date, the most enthusiastic Summit planners in Oregon, California, Arizona, and Ohio have been large employers. Stay tuned . . .
(*ACOEM = American College of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, the professional society for occupational medicine physicians.)
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