Injuries, fines, workers’ compensation claims, lawsuits, loss of equipment, turnover—employers these days have a lot to worry about when it comes to property and casualty risk.
As an insurance broker, you should be worried about all that too. After all, you have the power to offer solutions.
Don’t sit back as your clients’ bills pile up. It’s your job to make their issues your issues. If you don’t mitigate the risks your insureds face, you’ll become yet another source of financial stress. From that point, it’s only a matter of time until the employers you “serve” drop you for someone else—someone who offers real value.
Not sure where your brokerage falls in this equation? Consider whether you’re providing meaningful solutions to the most significant areas of P&C and workers’ comp risk insureds face today:
Workforce Training
Do you know how your clients currently deliver training to their employees? There’s a good chance it might not be happening effectively or consistently throughout the workforce.
Different employee populations have different learning needs, styles, and preferences. Few learning management systems on the market function reliably in every context. An online training course designed for mid-market business doesn’t account for the needs of a group of coal miners, for instance. An LMS last updated in 2010 can’t educate auto dealer employees about the regulations they’re on the hook for in 2020, or keep them up to date with new laws.
Effective training is flexible. It can be updated quickly and delivered in different formats—online or on-site, where and when employees need it. It’s also based on employees’ roles, with each course tailored to learners’ specific needs rather than through a one-size-fits-all LMS.
At the very least, a training tool needs to capture the information regulators look for—completion of courses, comprehension of policies, and so forth. Otherwise, it’s not much better than no training at all. And yet the systems many employers annually shell out $15,000–20,000 for can’t meet this basic necessity.
Give your clients a better solution and you’ll save them thousands up front, as well as exponentially more over the long term. See what effective workforce training looks like in action.
Incident Tracking and Auditing
I’m willing to bet your clients could use better visibility into their workplace safety initiatives. They want to more easily track injuries and claims, see trends, evaluate policies, and measure the adoption of those policies. Ideally, they’d like to be able to take care of existing risk areas and address potential issues before they happen.
Many brokers lag behind in this area because they offer clients tools that were built for the insurance industry, not for end-users. In other words, these tools are all about positioning the broker as the hero, without doing much to make clients’ lives any easier.
An employer-centric risk management solution minimizes effort on the part of the insured. It not only automates claim reports and other paperwork but facilitates audits and ensures the audits happen consistently across locations.
This approach has numerous benefits for employers. For one, it eliminates room for error in conducting inspections and filling out forms such as the OSHA 300 Log. Moreover, it gives employers greater control over their programs, shifting the focus from tedious documentation to incident prevention. Your insureds can spend their time getting ahead of issues rather than dedicating hours to documenting incidents.
Imagine having smart, automated checklists during walkthroughs facility inspections. You could track items and assign corrective actions on the fly, using the phone in your pocket. That’s what the leading broker-provided tools look like for insureds. Check out the difference for yourself.
Complete P&C Risk Management
Better workforce training, incident tracking, and auditing are just a few of the advantages you can provide to employers through an effective risk management tool.
At KPA, our solution also automates certificate tracking. Users can streamline the certificate of insurance management process to minimize third-party vendor risk. Beyond the compliance requirements of tracking COIs, what we’re really talking about here is risk transfer.
It’s one more component of a system designed top to bottom with employers’ needs in mind. From training to tracking, each of these elements ultimately empowers the end-user—your client—to cultivate and maintain a proactive safety culture. Rather than training in response to incidents, an employer can drive safety awareness and policy adoption from day one.
For your clients, it’s about getting ahead of workplace hazards and having a comprehensive overview of employees, departments, and facilities, while easily generating the documentation necessary to prove compliance.
For you, it’s about providing the tools and expertise to be considered a real problem-solver—giving your clients something they can actually use.
And for both parties, it means fewer worries—and more time, energy, and capital to grow the business. I’d call that a win-win.
(Originally published, February 2020)
