Workers Compensation and the Changing Nature of Work for Remote and On-Site Employees

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Logo, CSS. Text, Workers Compensation and the Changing Nature of Work for Remote and On-Site Employees.

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JUSTIN: A few notes before we begin. If you have a question for the presenters during today’s session, please submit them by writing in the question box, the Q&A box. Feel free to ask at any point in the presentation, we will reserve time at the end for Q&A. Following this session, the recording will be available on risk knowledge and Opis within one business week. All downloads and related contact information will be accessible through the sponsor. And on to today’s session. With the changing nature of remote work comes new safety and claim considerations and now is the time for employers to adjust their workforce safety plans. What do you need to be aware of and how can you get ahead of new type of injuries? In this 60-minute webinar, Louisa Desson will be joined by esteemed panelists to help you understand new exposures and develop practices to help protect employees and maintain productivity whether workers are remote or in the office. RIMS is thrilled to welcome a huge global audience, Louisa Desson of Travelers. We’ll begin.

LOUISA DESSON: Great, thank you very much Justin. Thank you all for joining us today to discuss this important topic, how to protect your employees and help maintain productivity whether they’re at home or in the office. As Justin mentioned, I'm Louisa Desson, Director and Senior Editor at Travelers, where I create articles and video and other content to help keep our customers keep their employees safe and protect their businesses. I'm fortunate that I get to work closely with our three panelists today on topics related to workers compensation, workplace safety, and employee wellness. I'll let them introduce themselves in a moment.

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Images of panelists are displayed with a brief description of each. Logo, CSS. Text, Our Panel. Chris Hayes, 2nd Vice President Risk Control. Rich Ives, Vice President, Workers Compensation Claims, Les Samsel, Sr. Director, Business Insurance RMIS, Louisa Desson, Director & Senior Editor, Enterprise Integrated Marketing at Travelers.

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LOUISA DESSON: So let's get started. First, Chris, introduce yourself please.

CHRIS HAYES: Hi, my name is Chris Hayes. I'm the lead for workers compensation and auto at Travelers Risk Control.

LOUISA DESSON: Thank you and Rich?

RICH IVES: Hello, everyone, I'm Rich Ives. I have over 20 years of experience with the broader Travelers companies. I have day to day responsibility for workers compensation claim. And I'm also the practice lead across several different segments of business insurance claim overall. Certainly, our Constitution state services would be one of those examples.

LOUISA DESSON: Very good, and Les.

LES SAMSEL: Hi everyone, my name is Les Samsel, Senior Director with Travelers' Risk Management Information Services Department. I lead the team of RIMIS Consultants around the country supporting business insurance.

LOUISA DESSON: Okay well, thank you all for taking the time today and let's get started.

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Text, New Workspaces Create New Challenges. Logo, CSS. Two images displayed: A woman sitting at desk and a woman sitting on the couch working.

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LOUISA DESSON: So our first question is how is the world changing when it comes to how employers are thinking about workplace safety, workers comp?

CHRIS HAYES: So, Louisa, I'll kick this off and I think you can look at the image here on the screen and get a sense of how things might have changed over the last few months.

If you take a moment to look at where you likely are sitting right now, it's probably going to look a little bit like a combination of these two visuals on the screen. If you go back to last year, odds are you're working in an office that was well ergonomically designed, had a desk that was set up for your height, and for your reach. And it was set up with hallways and walkways and were set up to be very smooth, no fall hazards, nothing like that.

And I'm going to guess today is a little bit different. I know I started working from home in March. As I've had to share with my co-workers here, my cats always seem to know exactly when there was a webinar and they like to join me. So if you do see fuzzy face show up here, that's what happened. But I'm going to guess I'm not the only one that's happened to over the course of the last few months.

It is a slightly different world. And I think well, our audience often thinks about the different world looking like the difference between the person on the left versus right. We've also got to think about the differences in other workplaces as well and what those challenges look like. So there are still people working in factories, there as people working in supermarkets, warehouses, meat processing plants, all sorts of things that are going on out there where people are still in the workplace and that workplace is different.

So think about barriers, think about separation, think about all these things which are now which is common to how we work and what that means for a risk management standpoint. So it takes a moment to see whether a person who might be working in a factory used to have a manager who is able to see what they were doing, provide coaching and feedback, and make direct observations on how that person was working.

But now because of social distancing, maybe the risk manager is no longer in that facility, maybe because the longer that facility may be barriers unit for COVID have prevented you from seeing exactly what she's doing during the course of that day.

So now risk management looks different. And I'll take one more example and think, what about that person who might be doing deliveries in a truck? So let's say someone's making a daily delivery, might be driving a few hundred miles from home. And as we see, colder weather is coming up and perhaps that person steps out of the truck, slips, and twist their ankle. Now, last year be a very simple thing to call your manager, get medical attention, and have that taken care of smoothly.

But imagine you're an employee hundreds of miles from home. You need to go to a doctor or to a medical facility and you're afraid of COVID. So what does this mean? It means that everything has changed and there's this continual cycle of things evolving our workforce as we go through.

So again, what we think of it largely in terms of that person who went from sitting at the desk to sit on the couch. And by the way, don't sit on your couch; try to set up something like the other person there. It really is much broader than that. And a lot gets back down to how we work with our employees, how we engage with them, how we communicate with them. I think Rich has some thoughts on that.

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RICH IVES: Yeah, as I hear you talk about that Chris, and certainly the work from home since about the spring of last year, my mind goes to Groundhog Day, right. And I'm sure many others do as well. In that famous line in the movie, it's Groundhog Day, again probably resonates with all of us as we start each day. But you know, 2020 has certainly been a year like no other. And if you're a sports fan, you know, we've experienced basketball in a bubble, certainly for our football fans and those in Green Bay, there's no Lambeau Leap. And if you're a golf fan, the Roar is missing from Augusta this week, right. And so that is certainly a lot of things in two thousand and twenty are unique.

One thing that hasn't changed though, is that we are still here providing tools and capabilities and support for our customers and cheering on American businesses and looking to help you manage your overall cost of risk and to identify changes in the workplace, for sure.

When you think about post-injury management, things have changed. And much of the workflow and some of the strategy that we had pre COVID doesn't really if you think about it, work real well in a post COVID world.

Things are very different. And we think being able to identify new risks, as well as being able to understand new technology and capabilities that exist to help manage post injury are really important. You know one thing, practically quarantine requirements really required the whole of the industry to adapt very quickly with new digital services, self-service capabilities, and with us, our ongoing commitment to investing in digital capabilities, as well as even our analytic capabilities, really prepared us well to manage this pandemic well. We think the industry in large did. We think that we've been able to do it more seamlessly than most. And if you think about the slide that Louisa will put up here, I mentioned that things are different than they were pre COVID.

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Six images of management tools are shown with corresponding text. Image of mobile device displayed with a statistic. Logo, CSS. Text, Virtual Claim Management Tools. Stats about sessions, engagement and use of virtual claim management tools.

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RICH IVES: And what I mean by that, just workers compensation is a more regulatory related process. Forms, manual forms, signature requirements, mailing paper checks, the need to show up in person to a hospital appointment or to a doctor's appointment. You know, things are very different now and we're really proud to kind of look at the slide in front of you, some of the capabilities that we've been able to really lift. The ability to chat with a nurse at any point in time, either by video, video face to face or in a chat like capability, either right at first notice of loss or at any time really throughout the life of that claim.

And we have had with our digital portal over eighty-five thousand registered users at this point in time. And they use the capability a lot more than and we're really approaching about one and a half million total messages being sent back and forth through that type of capability with over two and a half million sessions being long. Telemedicine is clearly then explosive during this period of time.

That's not something you just turn on. You look for the right billing practices, obviously, to make sure that we're paying what we owe you. Look for the right use of that telemedicine capability and then you think about any payment we've been able to issue fifty four million dollars so far as an organization just through e-payment with our launch of that type of a capability since the very beginning.

So we're proud of these type of capabilities. We think they add a ton of value to helping with injured employee engagement post injury. And we have other tools and capabilities for our customers as well that we'll talk about later here today.

LOUISA DESSON: It really seems like these some of these digital capabilities, despite the social distancing, have really helped with more of a one on one connection between the injured worker and the claims professional, which is great. So as we see people working remotely, what claims are we seeing are a different or what are you seeing in the field?

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Rich Ives speaking over slide 5. Text, Though Still Low, Work-From-Home Claims have Increased. Logo, CSS. Graph is displayed showing notice volume by month. A table is shown for the industry split.

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RICH IVES: Yeah, good question. We see really a mix of both lower severity as well as an increasing risk for some higher severity type injuries. And, you know, this example here in front of you is one that's really interesting to us.

We saw before COVID hit the rise and frequency of work from home injuries because just because employers were offering that type of flexibility to their employees. We knew that was important, being able to track work from home injuries, so that we could help both mitigate exposures as well as just kind of track what's going on in that space.

So you know, we had that pre COVID, so we got a little bit of a benchmark here within our organization. You can see represented in the blue, kind of month by month, the claims that we've seen reported to us that really happened while somebody is working from home. You see the in the gray bars, the ramp up of workplace injuries while people are working from home since COVID. So, no surprise.

And that's not due to the risk changing. It's actually just due to the fact that you've got a greater proportion of employees working from home.

You also see some of the industries on the right hand side. And I think the thing that's interesting about this is our mind instantly goes to some of those industry types where work from home is probably a little bit more prevalent, but you probably don't think about things like manufacturing or wholesale trade. But those types of industries are also seeing this type of a risk happen because you have jobs like sales jobs, administrative roles that can be done from home. And so even there, you know, this is a change here that I think really goes across a number of different industry type splits.

Now, one thing that's interesting is know we see a higher proportion of controverted claims in this space just because someone was injured during work hours while working at home doesn't mean necessarily it's a compensable workplace injury. So having a partner that can really help you think through the investigation of those losses is really, really important.

If there’s Q&A on that one, I got a couple of great stories to kind of go into that in that space.

We are seeing a little bit of a lower mix of severity. The types of injuries that we're seeing coming out of this type of loss: strains, sprains, those types of injuries that really relate more to ergonomic issues are most prevalent in this space

Now additionally, on the higher severity side, this one's an interesting one I think NCCI may have just published a study on this recently about there could be potentially good news with fewer vehicles on the road maybe we're going to see fewer motor vehicle accidents.

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Image of vehicles on highway. Statistic of motor vehicle death rates. Logo, CSS.

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RICH IVES: That one is an interesting one because from motor vehicle accidents and worker's compensation, we find that they represent roughly five percent of our overall claims. But the loss cost side of a motor vehicle accident represents anywhere between 11 to 15 percent for some of our industries that are a little more exposed. You can ignore the 20 percent of your losses from work comp really come from motor vehicle type accidents.

LOUISA DESSON: We're seeing that stat.

RICH IVES: Yeah, go ahead.

LOUISA DESSON: I was just saying we’re seeing that stat on the screen here that the 20 percent jump in motor vehicle deaths that rates the first six months of 2020, which seems to be counterintuitive if everyone is working from home and off the road. But we're seeing that go up so that correlates with what you're saying.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, so if I can if I can jump in on that for a moment. I think one thing we've seen is when traffic dropped very considerably back in March and April, we saw that the people that were on the road saw a wide-open road ahead of them and speeds went up, distraction went up.

So those core activities that made people more challenging drivers actually got worse. So, traffic density went down just raw number of crashes went down, but severe crashes went up. And as you can see, in many states, fatalities went up. So, it's kind of a mixed story. So, road risk has actually gone down a bit. But the severity of the crashes, the speeds involved in these crashes, and the injuries and fatalities of all this crashes has actually gone up.

So it's still an evolving story as people are getting back to work, as traffic comes up and down. But definitely the roads have not become a safe place. They are still a challenge for us from a comp side and for a liability side.

LOUISA DESSON: Interesting, and you talked a bit about some of the ergonomic issues, and we know that some of those take a little bit longer to manifest themselves as folks are working from home. Chris, what are some ways that employers can get ahead of issues before they become potential claims?

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Chris Hayes speaking over slide 7. Text, Get Ahead of Issues Before They Become A Potential Claim. Logo, CSS. Three images are displayed. Each image followed with text underneath.

CHRIS HAYES: You know, Rich touched on this before but one of the key things is just really staying engaged with your employees, making sure you are connected with them and in listening for the challenges they have. As an example, talking to my own manager not too long ago when he realized that I was looking at my laptop screen. So how can you possibly not have a second larger screen? So I like my laptop. Well, you know what? We're going to get to a larger screen.

So kind of being on the lookout for those things, those cues, as people talk to you about developments of things like wrist pain, back pain, my eyes hurt, just kind of understanding where those trends are happening and learning how to address them, especially for that home worker. There's lots of training that you can do. There's evaluations you can do remotely to help get people to the right workstation. So just for that, that person who was in the office is now working at home, lots of ways to engage and provide them tools even though they are remote, you might not be able to see them. Because if you think about the changes that are going on over the course of the year, we've had companies that have downsized, people are now hiring back, we're expecting to see the usual change in seasonal hiring going on for the next few months. You've got to think about what that means to our risk. We already know that employees who are new to the job are at increased risk of having accidents and injuries.

And they're coming back perhaps to a job that is as brand new, a job that's been reengineered. So really understanding what are the challenges or the new demands of jobs. If you had an employee in a role six months ago and you're bringing them back into your facility, odds are that everything about that has changed. So it's worth doing a fresh risk analysis and a fresh ergonomics analysis of everything that they're doing.

LOUISA DESSON: That's interesting. The idea of focusing on the training, I think some of us hope that this would be a temporary situation and as it leads to be a longer break, just taking the time to invest in that training and on board employees into jobs with that in mind.

CHRIS HAYES: Absolutely. And I think as people come back to work, as production ramps up in some places, as people move back to offices, you've got to really think about what are the trends you can start seeing so you can start addressing them. I think it's very easy for us to say, oh people started working from home and that's one set of challenges. But if you look at someone who might be some of the people on this call, we spend a lot of our days on the phone.

But I also have friends who are illustrators, who are copywriters, who are programmers, and they're keying or moussing all day long. There’s actually very physically different demands, although we have the same workstation. So interesting enough as you get to a larger organization, you might start seeing these trends in your data, which allows you to kind of get ahead of it and say, you know, my accounting departments having the increase in workstation related injuries, whereas my sales partner is not or vice versa. It's really being about drill down and deploy the resources that you need.

LOUISA DESSON: And you mentioned data analytics, which naturally brings us to less and less. How can companies use data and analytics to identify and respond to these trends, especially today?

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LES SAMSEL: Thank you, Louisa. So I'd like to just piggyback off of two things that were previously mentioned. Chris had talked a little bit about the importance of recognizing and understanding how best to meet the challenges of this new working environment, specifically not being close in proximity or staying connected to your employees, not being able to communicate as quickly and easily when an accident occurs.

And secondly, Rich mentioned earlier the demand for better tools, digital capabilities and technology is extremely high, now more critical than ever. So these two key points really highlight the need to utilize RIMIS tools and leverage the help of RIMIS professionals. They can assist you in utilizing tools most efficiently, most efficiently, and leveraging those tools to make sure that you're staying close to the action to recognize your trends, identify certain outliers that you may be seeing your data. Risk managers and other users of RIMIS applications typically use those tools in a variety of ways.

But really the primary function is analysis. The users can stay up to date, closely monitor various things like nature of injuries, body parts affected by some of those injuries, occupation, age of some of the injured employees, and really zero in on specific cost drivers. So depending on where you arrive within that first initial stab at that task, you'll undoubtedly need to be able to move through a variety of metrics and characteristics associated with your losses to drill down and continue drilling down into further exploring some of those details. As you go through your data and monitor your losses, the RIMIS users actually going to gain more and more insight as you go through, and that's going to aid in your overall decision-making process relative to your risk management program.

Now, I know what I mentioned sounds extremely tedious and time consuming, and it certainly can be. But having a RIMIS tool that allows you to maneuver between your data with agility, that's what's going to help make that task effortless. Not to say that working with massive amounts of data is very easy. We certainly know that that's not the case. And this is where being a partner with a RIMIS provider that offers a personalized help and support of a RIMIS professional to help guide you, that's where that's going to pay dividends. The partner… sorry.

LOUISA DESSON: I was gonna say, it seems like it's especially important now as things are changing so quickly to get some structure around analyzing things before they become trends to get ahead of those types of injuries.

LES SAMSEL: Absolutely. You really want to stay on top of things and having a great tool definitely allows you to do that. So customization is also really very important. We know every company and organization is different and operates differently.

So there may be certain data elements that that are unique to your organization that you'll want to track. For example, you may have just implemented a risk control measure at one of your facilities that mandates each worker has to take a two- hour training webinar and you're going to want to track that so RIMIS can help you achieve that level of data tracking.

You can also maybe want to start to track, as Rich was talking a little bit earlier, we're seeing work from home incidence rise, and you may want to start to track some of those and be able to flag some of those so that you can use them in some analysis and compile them some of your data moving forward. So leveraging the RIMIS application help incorporate some of these data elements to make sure that you have all the data that's required to make your next decision. That's going to be extremely important when using a RIMIS system.

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Graph is displayed showing years of employment versus incurred dollars and claim count. Logo, CSS. Text, Newer employees are at Greater Risk

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LES SAMSEL: There's also another component that that I believe Chris had mentioned a little bit earlier, and that has to do with tenure. So we're seeing a lot of folks who are on the job less than a year experiencing some accidents which again, is to be expected I think Chris mentioned. So strong RIMIS applications are going to allow you to observe these types of data elements over a long landscape to really assess your lost experience and in this particular case, by tenure.

So in this example in our claim application, you can quickly just see that you've got a high volume of claim activity within that first new hire category.

And logically if you were to see this, your first course of action is probably going to be to scream because something's not going right with either implementation or something. But immediately after that, you're going to start to ask yourself some questions. Who are these individuals? What do they have in common? And here's where that maneuverability and agility becomes important. You want to know more information about this group. And so in this particular example, clicking on that particular bar is going to bring you into a new set of information.

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Table is displayed Logo, CSS. Text, Newer employees are at Greater Risk

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LES SAMSEL: So here then you can easily see of that group what were the causes of accident. And now you can continue to review some of the certain safety measures associated with these types of accident causes. I mentioned earlier a little bit about customization. And if you've worked with your RIMIS professional, hopefully you would have created an organizational structure or some refer to it as a pyramid and that's how you can further layer your losses. So this is really going to improve your analysis exponentially because now you'll be able to not only identify your tenure and your accident causes, you'll be able to pinpoint directly where within your organization these are occurring. And again, then you can start to make your other decisions relative to your risk management program.

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Two screenshots are displayed with text to the left side. Logo, CSS. Text, Track Discomforts.

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LOUISA DESSON: That's very helpful, and you can talk a little bit about tracking the discomforts as well?

LES SAMSEL: Yeah and last but not least, a lot of our customers have expressed some pain points in really just the day to day recordkeeping of things that occur each and every day. And so some of these occurrences are probably not worthy of a claim at the immediate point in time. Some people will jot some of this information down on the on a notepad or keep an Excel spreadsheet. But what happens when this occurrence that was simple now maybe has to be reported to your to your TPA or carrier

You'll want to have record of it. And so many RIMIS applications will have a record keeping tool. And again, this will allow you to keep updated records. You'll have record of that historically. And when it does occur, you'll be able to report that claim very seamlessly into your TPA or carrier. And you'll also be able to include some of these occurrences as part of your overall loss analysis.

And I can go on and on but just the main takeaway here is that in any challenging environment, the demand for RIMIS tools and services is going to grow and leveraging that remised technology is only going to improve your results and have a positive impact on your overall risk management program.

LOUISA DESSON: That's great, thank you. The ability to identify patterns and track them and just mitigate them certainly extremely valuable. And you showed us some different types of causes of injuries which have workplace injury exposures changed with the pandemic?

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Text, Workers Compensation and COVID-19. Logo, CSS. Graph is displayed suggesting COVID Claims By Week.

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RICH IVES: It really in two ways, the first one, and very practically that everybody is really dealing with is the, you know, the risk of in the issue of occupational illness. And we're providing you a little insight here around the trend that we have seen for COVID workers compensation notices as they come into our organization.

So, you know, the one thing that I think jumps up off the page here to you a little bit is, you know, as infections have gone up generally across the population, so have we seen our trend of COVID notice notices. And generally speaking, we normally see between where infections rise in a geographical population, normally we see workers compensation claims show up around 20, 30 days after. So with the rise in infection that we saw in the spring, you see the claim show up pretty quickly after that. And summer, you see our claim volume go up there, then in late July, and then if we showed you the data over the last few weeks, we are again in a spot of being a seeing a surge of illnesses.

Now, this is certainly for sure, this issue of COVID is going to be around for a while, regardless of how quickly, you know, an effective vaccine can be generally commercially available. This issue is going to be around for a while. And generally speaking, we normally consider those risks to employers of in the space of occupational illness. Did the work put that employee at a greater degree of exposure?

Now presumption laws and general infection rates increasing in the fact that a co-worker could have come down with the disease certainly throws a lot of different things that need to be considered as you're working through these types of exposures. We know in one state, for example, there's been a burden placed on employers to actually track regardless if the illness was caused by the occupation or not. How many illnesses they've had in a location in order to determine if an outbreak happened.

So certainly employers are dealing with things that are very different in this world than maybe they have in the past. Now to help with that and obviously thinking through the investigation of, is this illness a compensable injury or that the business is responsible for? Now you need to be able to really use some different tools and capabilities. One that we have developed is a social listening tool that identifies what activity was the employee involved in prior to their there being infected and did it really happen?

Did the infection, did the exposure exist at work, or did it come from the fact that they were at a large public gathering seven days prior to when they started seeing symptoms? So certainly automated listening tools, a social listening tools like that, have been very helpful for us and we hope they've been a helpful to our customers as well.

Now I said two ways. The second is that let's take COVID of the mix for a second. If it's a normal workplace injury, one of the tools that we use to help with injured employee engagement and good recovery practices, as well as to mitigate cost, is transitional duty. Really important. We talk about getting back to work, getting back to work, to get healthy. And because of the issues, there are fewer transitional duty opportunities out there that maybe what there once were. So I think that's an issue that we're dealing with. And maybe we're thinking about things a little differently, you know, in a post COVID world, we've ramped up a lot of work from home opportunities. Does that provide some additional transitional duty opportunities that didn't exist prior? That might help.

LOUISA DESSON: Employees might be even after COVID, more able to work from home so that it opens up some possibilities. Great. So as employees begin to return to work, how do you protect them in this new world? Chris I’ll turn it to you.

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Chris Hayes speaking over slide. Text, Hybrid Models and “Hotel Space”. Logo, CSS. Image of hybrid hotel space/workspace is displayed.

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CHRIS HAYES: I think the thing to do is just keep on observing, monitoring how things are evolving. The example we have here is, is that hybrid hotel space. And it really is just the one example that kind of brings all those pieces together.

So even before COVID, we saw organizations moving towards that sort of shared space, shared workspace. As more people start work from home and would come into the office, you would have one workstation. People might come in and out of that hotel space.

And we're hearing that, well, that might be more common and more popular in the next few years. We've all shown that people are working from home fairly well but we do anticipate people will want to go to the office for some for various reasons. So we think that hotel space will become a much more common thing now. Now, what challenges is that present at? The very basics of it is one desk does not fit everyone. So be able to create a hotel space that is still adjustable.

To meet everyone's particular physical needs is important. And once you do that, you get to do training for every employee on how to make those adjustments and get them to the right spot so that they don't have these simple ergonomics related workplace injuries on top of that.

And they are coming back to an office with a shared space and including a protocol should be a big part of that. So how are you going to clean as you get there? How are you going to clean as you're done? And what steps will you take to make sure that's being done properly? So you can see something as simple as going to people shared desk space becomes even more complicated. And this is before we start having a robust set of claims to start doing more analysis of and find what we might be missing.

So I think the key is having an open mind as we go into whatever the workspace of the next few years looks like and keep a sharp eye on how things are changing, what trends are emerging to get ahead of them.

LOUISA DESSON: Thank you very much. Yeah, I think the common themes among what all three have you been saying: the importance of determining a trend when you see it and just promptly responding to it to help mitigate the risk before it becomes a claim. And then when you do see those flames start to come in to work to mitigate those from becoming a larger problem. So very helpful discussion. And we can turn now to some of the questions that are starting to come in.

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LOUISA DESSON: The first one looks like a good question for you, Rich. Are you using telemedicine to help remedy the challenges we face with COVID-19?

RICH IVES: To remedy the challenges so I think what we what we've been seeing with telemedicine when we think about adoption of the use of it, it's primarily come from a couple of different areas.

One is right at the very front end. So, you know, especially for claims that are not as severe. The ability to rate at that first notice of loss, to be able to chat with a nurse, to be able to move seamlessly from that spot rate to a video visit with a doctor and be able to conduct your doctor's visit right there by video, that's clearly a great use of the of the capability. The other area that we've really seen a great adoption is in the use of rehab, physical therapy visits, and the ability to provide exercises in monitoring and look at range of motion and all those good things that you would normally do in a PT visit.

We do see some terrific use there. We don't see it as much, with a little bit more of the severe type injuries that really need an initial physical examination. But the follow up visits post that with the primary care provider is another really good use of telemedicine capable capability. So we see that.

We also see, I will tell you, health of mind and engagement of the injured employee is just key. So I think one resounding message for employers is really look for a partner who's going to help you do that. And for yourself, you'll find ways to keep engaged with that injured employee post injury, especially in light of all the different challenges your folks are dealing with is really key.

LOUISA DESSON: A very helpful thing. So we had a question about the increase in auto accidents. Chris, with the increase in car accidents, are we seeing this as a result of single car accidents?

CHRIS HAYES: And that's a good question. It's really a mix, but for the most part, the increase in the more severe accidents is multiple car accidents.

In fact, the leading cause of these high severity crashes is speed and distraction, which again, not so surprising is what's been causing the increase in crashes for some time. But against that perception that you can drive faster and be a little more distracted and it's okay, which means that what might have been a distracted driving crash at 60 miles an hour last year is now, in some cases, distracted driving crash at 90 miles an hour.

Several states have reported that the amount of drivers going over 80, 90 miles per hour has gone up just dramatically over the course of the year. It doesn't seem to be slowing. And the more speed you put into the vehicle, the more likely you are to have a severe crash.

LOUISA DESSON: I think it is that perception at the beginning of the pandemic that you might have been the only one on the road and yet there certainly are people on the road and there's still risks and the importance of having distracted driving, training with your employees, and encouraging them to follow driving expectations more important than ever.

CHRIS HAYES: Absolutely. If you look at the ways that companies can approach distracted driving. If an employees are driving distracted and you ask them why, often the answer is because my manager called me. So I always like to say don't start with the tractor driving conversation with the employee, start it with the manager and anyone in the office who might feel the need to call them and look your operation, look at why you have this need for communication and see which you can do to retool that.

It's just like working in a factory or working in a warehouse. You say, we keep having people whose backs are lifting this thing. Why are we lifting them? If we have crashes because people are speeding on the phone, why are they speeding on the phone? What can we as a management organization do to reduce the perception of our employees that that’s appropriate and needed? So it really comes back to what is your operation, how to communicate with your employees, and how do you organize your operation to reduce or eliminate these risks.

LOUISA DESSON: Very good, thank you. Rich we had a follow up question on the COVID outbreak, so if employees return to work and get COVID or an outbreak occurs, could that be considered a worker's comp claim?

RICH IVES: So I'll start by saying, first of all, this is a very dangerous question to answer because there are just so many specific things that you need to really think through. First and foremost, every state law is different in this space, right. So it depends also on the type of work the individual does.

I think the other thing that's very important was the outbreak that was mentioned in the question, was the outbreak unique to that location that that injured and or that an employee who was infected? Was it unique to that location that they were working in? Or is there been a general outbreak in the community at large and in that space?

So there's a lot of things to really think through there. But it does go back to, if you want to air on the side of caution, any of the social distancing practices and good general things that we would put out there as tools really, really need to pay very close attention to those or you could you could have some compensable workplace injuries there that you're probably certainly not used to in the past.

LOUISA DESSON: Thank you. We have a question about keeping employees safe at home, potentially. Should employers be thinking about buying their employees equipment for their work from home arrangements? Chris, I'll ask you this one.

CHRIS HAYES: You know, the fact because we talked about that earlier today and this call that my manager said we really should get you some more equipment of working from home.

And I think it points to the fact that it yes, you should be thinking about it. And it depends on your employees, what they're doing from home and what their risks are. As we put out earlier, every job, every employee has a different set of tasks that they do which carry a different set of risks. So I don't want to say there is a blanket. Absolutely get a full equivalency to your office desk setup at home for every employee.

But you really should spend some time understanding what are people doing on a daily basis? What are the risk factors involved with that? Again, we've got plenty of tools on the Travelers side. They're going to help people understand what those things are and take a look at where some of the complaints are coming from. Do you have employees who are experienced back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain because of their workstation? And based on that information, start making the decision as to where to invest your money. So that a blanket? Yes, but it should definitely be a consideration. And you should use all the tools at your disposal to figure out where those dollars can best be spent.

LOUISA DESSON: Thank you. Rich do you have anything to add there?

RICH IVES: Well, you know, I was just thinking, listening to Chris talk about that. You know, even something as simple as does the employee have a defined workspace? Right.

So we instantly go to monitors and ergonomics setups. Well, if I'm trying to do my work each day from a makeshift spa, like he mentioned on the couch, probably not a defined workspace that you would want. So I think as things start to get back to whatever normalcy that will exist, employers are going to want to think about do they want to adopt some greater work from home flexibility practices? And that's the spot to say, you know, if they're thinking about allowing it, there are certain things that the injured, the employee needs to, you know, agree to maybe in order to really protect themselves and the employer.

CHRIS HAYES: I’ll just continue that for a moment. Rich brings up an idea we've knocked down a few times, which is the idea of a work from home contract agreement, something that defines what are the hours are going to work, what are what are breaks like, what sort of desk setup you need to have so that you don't end up spending hundreds or thousands of dollars setting someone up for a nice desk environment and then they're working on their couch.

So to create some definition and structure around how you expect employees to work and then see what they need to meet that expectation could be a way to approach this.

LOUISA DESSON: Very helpful, thank you. You may have seen the headlines about employees working longer hours because they are home so encouraging them in a document like that to take breaks and explaining why that's important from an ergonomic perspective could be really helpful. Good advice. So we had a question for a little bit more detail on the social listening. Rich, with the increase in claims from working from home, could you talk a little bit more about how social listening is done to investigate the validity of those claims?

RICH IVES: Yeah, I'll go into just a little bit for you. The neat thing about that type of a tool is I think we all generally had some investigative practices that were to go out and look at publicly available information through social media forums at times for investigation.

The thing that an automated social listening tool does is it really takes into account any and all publicly available information at any point in time. And it continues to run, right. So I think in that way, it's the ability to be in multiple places at one time. It certainly is more efficient. It certainly provides a different degree of effectiveness. Within that there’s, you know, the algorithm that we've designed that says, look for these types of things, whether it's words or activities or whatnot, to then bring those to the forefront.

It doesn't answer the question. It simply brings forward here's something you might want to consider based on the rule set that we programmed in so that the claim professional can look at that and say, let me make this part of my investigation. Maybe it applies, maybe it doesn’t.

So I don't want to give anybody the thought there that we're running a social listening type of tool, an algorithm, and it's giving us the answer regardless. We have to still think through with human intelligence, but it certainly makes us smarter than we were before.

LOUISA DESSON: Great, such a helpful tool right now in this kind of dispersed world to get a handle on what's happening to employees. That's all of the questions we have time for today. This was a tremendously robust discussion. Thank you Rich Ives, Chris Hayes, Les Samsel. And thanks to RIMS for letting us have this discussion. There's some great content that you can check out safety related content on our website.

So thank you very much for tuning in today. Contact your Travelers rep for more information.

JUSTIN: All right, excellent, I’d like to thank Louisa Desson of Travelers for being such a terrific moderator and panelists Rich Ives, Chris Hayes, and Les Samsel for their time and expertise. We got some fantastic insight an engagement today. I think that was a record for most questions answered. Remember that RIMS membership is open year round. Discover why ten thousand of your peers and more than 60 countries are part of the RIMIS community. Is it RIMS.org membership to join. Thank you all and stay safe.

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