Just the Cost of Doing Business?

By Lisa Bendall

What do fitness rooms, low-fat cafeteria menus and on-site day care centres all have in common when applied to the workplace?

They are all creative examples of how an employer can keep staff members healthy and high-performing.

These examples may sound glamorous, and perhaps expensive, but they don’t even come close to the costs associated with an employee who develops a disability and does not return to work.

Keeping employees healthy, both physically and emotionally, and accommodating and assisting people with disabilities to re-enter the work force as quickly and safely as possible, are key to what is termed "disability management," or "disability cost management." It means lowering or eliminating the unnecessary human, financial and social costs associated with disability.

Try putting a dollar figure on the costs of keeping an injured worker on social benefits or Workers’ Compensation. Ultimately, it amounts to billions of dollars. Add to that the company’s costs connected to the loss of a valuable employee, not to mention the insurance premiums, which now generally are based on the company’s own history of worker injuries (an "experience-rating system").

Beyond a financial outlook, there are significant social costs when an individual is prevented from contributing. It means society is not tapping into the potential of ALL the members of its communities.

And there are serious human costs to the individual herself. When she suddenly is no longer helping to support her family or is not participating to her fullest ability in society, her sense of self-worth can spiral downward, impacting on her level of personal happiness. Most often, with a lower income, her standard of living will also drop.

Imagine that all of these losses are completely preventable with only a bit of creativity and flexibility, an open mind, and a relatively small amount of spending, if any. Then you can understand the vast opportunities for our society when we work toward reducing these losses.

Job accommodation and health promotion isn’t all day-care centres and aerobics training programs. And it isn’t only for large or extravagant corporations. Even a small business can provide flexibility in hours to its staff if that will help them coordinate family priorities. And it isn’t only about prevention, either. While some disabilities can be avoided with the implementation of improved workplace safety and low-stress environments, many other disabilities are inevitable. What is not inevitable is that the worker with a disability must be shut out of the work force, directed to rely on the system for income for the rest of his life.

A pilot project undertaken by the federal government saw a $200,000 disability management program implemented in four of its departments, affecting 15,000 public servants, over a period of 17 months. The result? An estimated saving of over $12.7-million (a more than 60-to-1 return on the investment!).

The results of the project seem to prove that worker injuries are not, as employers traditionally believed, just "the cost of doing business."

There are so many stakeholders in disability cost management, you can’t count them on one hand, or even two -- you’d need to take off your socks and shoes! Employers, insurers, professionals in the fields of occupational health and safety, training and rehabilitation, workers with and without disabilities, unions, researchers, engineers, Workers’ Compensation Boards, the medical community, taxpayers... there is a long list of sectors with an interest in disability prevention and workplace reintegration. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be anyone who really loses from a sweep toward effective disability cost management in the workplace.

That is why an estimated 1,500 delegates from a variety of backgrounds are expected to attend the National Conference on Disability and Work, October 7 to 9, in Toronto. Through workshops, panels, presentations, discussion groups and exhibits, the conference will offer "straight talk and practical solutions to reduce the escalating human, financial and social cost of disability in Canada."

Employers have been slow to change in this direction, the federal government included. For example, the Government of Canada’s insurance premiums cost $100-million per year just to cover its public service workers. But if fewer employees drop out of the work force because of a disability, insurance companies can afford to become more competitive and lower their premiums.

The concepts of health, safety and reintegration are already being adopted in some Canadian workplaces, like Chrysler, Ford and Dupont. They are showing very encouraging results: reducing occupational accidents and bringing disability costs under control. Not to mention the added value of their diversified work force.

But Alar Prost, Manager of Strategic Initiatives with Human Resources Development Canada, says that for disability management to work, there must be visionary leadership right from the top -- setting out a vision of a safe, healthy and productive workplace and bringing in stakeholder sectors to help develop and implement measures to see the vision become a reality.

"More executives need to understand the opportunities, and have the capacity to envisage what those opportunities will bring to them a few years down the road," says Prost. It is a challenge in a time of downsizing, as health and safety programs are often the first to go. But Prost points out that companies certainly "will pay a price down the road" if they take that route.

The National Conference on Disability and Work hopefully will enlighten more senior personnel across sectors. The Conference Organizing Team is an impressive mix of consumers, government and private business, as are the leaders of the numerous workshops (approximately 55) that are scheduled.

The workshop titles are as diverse as the individuals themselves who are at the heart of the discussions. A small taste: "The Cost of Absence -- A Looming Crisis"; "Preventing Disabling Stress -- a Self-Managed Comfort in Change Program"; and "The European and Japanese Systems for Integrating People with Disabilities into the Workplace."

A conference hotline is set up at (613) 225-9496 to respond to inquiries. For those individuals who are electronically inclined, complete details about the conference program are available on its website: http://www.ncdw.wyaa.com.

(Lisa Bendall is the Managing Editor of ABILITIES.)