A Southern shopping tradition since 1888, department store chain Belk Inc. initiated a companywide risk management program that not only created a safer work environment and lowered workers' compensation injury rates, but also generated a healthy competition among managers to cut loss costs as well as new enthusiasm among employees to return to work faster—with a side benefit of elevated customer satisfaction.
The program’s implementation also earned Belk the title of “2007 Champion” in National Underwriter’s inaugural “Award For Excellence In Workers’ Compensation Risk Management.”
“The catalyst was that they were seeing their accident rate was almost three times the national average,” said Gary A. Nesbit, director of risk management at Belk Store Services. “The company didn’t have a formal risk management program, and the injury rate was running between 14 and 15 percent”—compared with the nationwide average of 7 percent, and Belk's current injury rate of 4.7 percent.
Belk’s injuries, he added, are similar to those of most retailers, with the most common being slips, trips and falls—both for customers and employees (which Belk calls “associates”)—followed by lifting accidents.
He said Belk—which before 2004 focused on fire safety and Occupational Safety and Health Administration compliance—was “getting hit with ongoing increases on the workers’ comp and general liability side.” The organization realized it needed to bring in a team with experience developing and implementing a risk management program.
That team started with Mr. Nesbit in 2004, later adding Mark Meek (safety manager), Martha Basco (assistant risk manager) and Mashea Miller (risk triage analyst), which operates as a tight unit.
Mr. Nesbit, who has served on both sides of the fence, has been in the industry for about 30 years—the first 22 with St. Paul Companies, where for 10 years he was director of national programs working with national accounts on the risk management consulting side. Later, he worked as risk manager for Buffet’s Inc., a restaurant company where “we rebuilt the staff and were able to reduce [comp] frequency by about 50 percent over five years.”
As an insurer, he observed how often risk managers were “siloed and in their own world—safety and claims were in a different world,” with risk managers often focused on regulatory compliance but not taking an integrated approach, “either with business partners within the company, or even within risk management.”