How to Fix the North Carolina Workers’ Compensation System — Surfacing Hidden Dangers at Our Workplaces, Part 2
One of the cheapest and most humane ways to lighten the burden on the North Carolina workers’ compensation system is to suss out hidden dangers at our workplaces. In a recent blog post, we discussed two surprising but potentially very effective ways to create safer workplaces.
1. Reduce the availability of sugary, refined junk food snacks and replace them with healthier alternatives.
2. Create better information sharing platforms so that safety conscious workers and employers can better disseminate their useful insights.
Today, we’re going to look at one more insight from the world of business process improvement.
If you’re not a business owner, you may not be that familiar with the concept of Systems.
Basically, a system transforms input into output and thus provides value to clients. Top management thinkers often use business process improvement thinking to identify gaps in service or quality. Then they make incremental improvement (via process improvement) and/or major change-ups (via reengineering) to get better results and continually improve.
Most business thinkers — at least the successful entrepreneurs — engage in systematic thinking, planning, refinement, improvement, etc.
But although the North Carolina workers’ compensation system is, in fact, a System, very few thought leaders apply this business process improvement “kaizen-type” thinking to the dilemmas we all face.
That all sounds a bit abstract. So let’s break it down a bit.
The workers’ compensation system has thousands of stakeholders, including insurance companies, employers, state bureaucrats, attorneys, taxpayers, and of course workers.
The many moving parts of this system are dynamic. But the purpose of the system is well defined — to provide a financial help for hurt and injured workers and to resolve disputes that arise during the compensation process.
When problems arise in this system, the conventional approach is to blame stakeholders:
“The insurance company didn’t play fair”
“The sick/injured worker wasn’t really that sick and/or trumped up his damages”
“The employer was bad because he didn’t have insurances”
“The bureaucrats took way too long with the case.”
“The legislators are in the pockets of the corporations.”Etc.
We’re obviously not saying that these judgments aren’t important. If you’ve personally suffered because of an insurance company’s cruelty or employer’s narcissism, you know how damaging this kind of passing-of-the-buck can be.
But in addition to calling out lame stakeholders, we also could benefit from finding/repairing problems with the system itself — instead of just blaming people or companies or whole classes of stakeholders.
Of course, if you’ve personally been hurt, the last thing you care about is fixing this system as a whole. You want specific, actionable advice about your case. Call the DeMayo Law team today for a free consultation to help you maximize your results — 1.877.529.1222.
