Determining the Effectiveness of Your Shoe Program

Many fast food restaurants require slip resistant shoes as a part of their workers’ compensation slip and fall program. The goal of the use of slip resistant shoes is to increase the slip friction threshold in the greatest amount of square footage possible. However, how do you determine if the program is working?

If there has been a slip and fall issue in the past, the most obvious way to track effectiveness is to compare both frequency and severity of losses before and after the implementation of the program. Frequency of slip and falls before and after is a pretty safe determinant of effectiveness. A decrease in severity can also show effectiveness because the shoes should increase the time between the loss of footing and impact and therefore give more time to brace for the fall. However, this is much less of an indicator of effectiveness as severity is drastically impacted by age and health of the employee as well as the location of the fall.

An ancillary impact to increasing the slip coefficient will be injuries related to near misses, times where the employee loss footing but not enough to fall but other injuries were incurred in breaking the fall. These injuries can range from strains in back, neck, oblique, or wrist. If you see an uptick in these injuries with a decrease in actual falls the shoe program is working but some other components of your program (kitchen cleanliness for instance) may not be.

Another ancillary impact on a new shoe program is just an overall increase in employee awareness of safety within the workplace in general. This can not only improve slip and fall losses but overall workers’ compensation losses. Therefore, monitoring how usage and enrollment correlate to overall losses can also be factors which demonstrate effectiveness of a shoe program.

Your insurance broker should be able to provide you with these loss comparisons as well as demonstrate how the change has directly affected your premium. If you need help analyzing this matter, feel free to contact Insurance Design & Placement, Inc.; your partner for controlling fast food workers’ compensation losses.