With losses at their highest levels in more than a decade,Workers Compensation carriers are raising premiums.

In some cases, it will be substantial. A California Workers compinsurer said it would be seeking a 20 to 30 percent rate hike thisyear, notes John McConnell, vice president of risk control in thestrategic outcomes practice at Willis.

Yet, most manufacturers approach workplace safety as they did ageneration ago, McConnell says. “There are still too manycompanies doing exactly what they did 20 years ago and expectingdifferent results and getting frustrated with not getting differentresults.”

That doesn't have to be the case, he says. There are managementsystems coming out of not only the United States but also Canada,Europe and Asia that he says can guide employers to 60 to 70percent reductions in injuries.

Notably among those workplace-safety continuous-improvementtools are ANSI Z10 and, from the Canadian Centre for OccupationalHealth and Safety, CSA Z1000.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Occupational Safety and HealthAdministration (OSHA) recently published a white paper thatexamines and finds significant value in injury- andillness-prevention programs, or I2P2, for which the agency hasproposed a federal standard.

Some companies with highly visible brands have recognized theimportance of implementing such a management system—as well asenjoying the favorable publicity that taking such a measuregenerates, McConnell says. But those companies represent only asmall percentage of manufacturers, he says.

Most companies establish a performance standard for each area ofthe organization. With one of these leading-edge management systemsin place, a company would, with worker input, modify itsperformance metrics of producing a certain number of qualityproducts or component parts within a specified time to includesafety performance, McConnell explains.

Instead of waiting for a workplace accident to happen and thenfixing the problem, “you look at your processes and makerisk-management assessments,” McConnell says.

Most manufacturers, though, “are still locked into regulatorycompliance and then controlling cost by managing claims,” McConnellsays “There still are a lot of companies in the U.S. stuck inthis mode.”

That approach might drive down losses to an extent, but theculture of the company still could expose it to serious and evencatastrophic safety problems, according to McConnell.

For example, 12 hours before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blewup in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, killing 11 workers andcausing the worst oil spill in U.S. history, officials fromrig-owner Transocean and operator British Petroleum visited thefacility to honor it for operating seven years without a lost-timeclaim.

That catastrophe illustrates how safety figures driven by aregulatory compliance approach can mask organizational culturalproblems that ultimately can lead to disastrous consequences,according to McConnell.

A management-process system focuses on an organization'sculture, eliminating fear about passing along safety informationthat executives might not enjoy hearing.

There's a focus on creating a value in the culture that inspiressafety performance by not only preventing injuries and reinforcingpositive behavior but also ensuring adequate training, openlyexamining near-misses and identifying behavior that is inconsistentwith corporate goals.

Taking corrective actions based on information that is invited“is where everyone wants to be,” McConnell says.

But it's tough to get there, McConnell acknowledges. “It's a lotharder to walk the walk than talk the talk in a tough economy wheremargins are reduced and everyone is doing more with less. There are a lot of competing pressures” for manufacturers' capitaland time.