Captive Resources Chief Risk Officer Andy Johnson recently joined the Global Captive Podcast to discuss risk management and safety for group captive members. Alongside Johnson was Lorraine M. Martin — the President and CEO of the National Safety Council (NSC) — and Richard Cutcher, host of the Global Captive Podcast. The conversation hit on many important topics for safety-conscious companies, with Johnson and Martin offering their expertise and insights based on their extensive experience.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation. Click here to listen to the full episode.
Cutcher kicked off this topic by commenting on how laser-focused Captive Resources and the members we work with are on safety and risk management. Johnson explained why safety is essential for companies in a member-owned group captive.
“It's a fundamental shift of culture with companies that join our captives,” said Johnson. “The old way of looking at things in safety and risk management was you engineer problems out. If you can't do that, you educate people to work around those problems. And if you can't do that, then you layer on top of that enforcement of rules and regulations.”
"The newer way of looking at it, which is much more what [group captive members], is that they try to engage people to empower and energize them to take safety and risk management from an ownership perspective," Johnson said. "The old way you looked at it, you are buying insurance. [In a group] captive, you become an owner, and when you own something, you tend to pay more attention to it, to treat it differently, to focus on how you can do it better.”
“For a lot of companies, you first need to make sure that you know how to evaluate your risk. Do you know what your safety issues are, what your risks are?” said Martin. “Businesses need to understand what actions they need to take to address [those risks].”
Martin explained that many businesses worry about the costs of taking those necessary actions and whether that investment will pay off.
“The first thing I would share with folks is [that not managing risk] is actually almost always more costly,” Martin said. “The annual cost of safety and health incidents worldwide annual is $150 billion. That includes medical expenses, insurance, property damage, administrative costs — not even to mention things having to do with the stress on your employees and their families and all of those other somewhat intangible things.”
According to Martin, nearly all the studies that look at risk management ROI show that companies get back between $3 and $10 for every dollar spent.
“Captive Resources has been a member of the NSC since 1992, and since that time, we have embraced so much of the training, conferences, and online resources that the NSC provides,” Johnson said. “For our members, [the relationship] has just been tremendous. I’ve never heard anything but positive comments from our members about the NSC.
“Over the years, we’ve enrolled over 5,000 companies that go through our different captive programs [in the NSC]. So that's a tremendous number of touchpoints. In my experience, it’s been nothing but positive.”
Click here to listen to the full conversion on Global Captive Podcast.
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