What are the true numbers of your business? You might know your company’s annual revenue, but have you ever conducted a risk evaluation? Have you analyzed the data you provide to your insurance carrier to identify areas of improvement within your company?
Your company could stand to benefit from assessing its risk level—a snapshot of attributes that impact the likelihood of making an insurance claim, such as rate of lost time incidents and on-the-job injuries—on a yearly basis. Not only does this assessment give you a more complete picture of what’s going on with your company and its employees, but completing your risk assessment with good numbers—or showing that you have improved those metrics over time—makes your company more appealing to insurance carriers. Because of this, it’s wise to consider conducting a yearly risk assessment to help keep your company’s employees safe and save some money while doing so.
The insurance renewal process is an opportunity to perform an honest evaluation of your company in terms of how it performed in the previous year. Assessing the data you provide with your annual insurance policy application can also lead to the kind of metrics that confirm whether your company is performing at the level you want it to. Insurance carriers require a large amount of information during the renewal process, and you will need to collaborate with multiple internal groups to pull data. The conclusions you draw from that data could help you save money in your annual insurance review.
The numbers in your risk evaluation could also reveal problems within your company or at least opportunities to improve. Be willing to identify what isn't working. This is an opportunity to identify annually reviewable metrics, such as:
- How many employees you have added to your workforce
- Whether goals were met and what new goals should be set for the coming year
- Loss numbers that indicate the success of safety programs in place
- Revenue per employee
While a thorough risk evaluation requires time and effort, don’t be intimidated by the idea. Work with your insurance manager, accounting department and safety group to complete your risk assessment each year, and then shop around for a new insurance carrier every 3 to 5 years to ensure you are taking advantage of the best rates available. As your strategic partner, your insurance carrier has a vested interest in your growth and development. Good numbers, such as lower numbers for losses and positively trending metrics, will equal a better premium rate for insurance.
Take a step toward improving your company's overall business health and the safety of your employess by undergoing a risk evaluation. Risk evaluation provides a unique opportunity to have a candid and frank discussion about information that ranges from the mundane to challenging, but provides key insights into your company.
