Safety Knights

It's a balancing act. Like you, I always try to way to "truthfully" get them back to work while abiding by any restrictions issued by the PLHCP. With that being said, it takes discipline by the employee and supervision by the employer to ensure they're following the orders and not doing anything to risk aggravating the injury/illness.

For some, they don't care about anything but the TRIR and DART rates, so lost work day (LWD) rates and severity rates won't really matter. For others, they do take it seriously. Nonetheless, I think it starts with a good relationship with your occ med provider. Giving them copies of your job descriptions so they understand the tasks and operations helps them understand how to safely and effectively get them back to 100% without reaggravating an injury/illness. I've even had some come out and physically walk the site so they can actually see our jobs rather than me telling them about it on paper.

IMO, there is ALMOST ALWAYS restricted duty work they can do to keep it from being a lost work day. Have them be a flagger, perform equipment inspections, scan or sort documents, upload things to the server, etc. There's plenty of things they can do. It's just a matter of whether the employer wants to pay them their full hourly rate to work on light duty.

I could write you a book on this one! But in short; First try everything you can do not to allow them off work to start with!! The “tricks” of the trade are numerous, but get the PLHCPs know you will accommodate almost any restriction. We would send out letters to every PLHCP in the area, and say something like, “Unless our employee is totally incapacitated we want them back at work, even if it is a short time each day.” If the Doc says they must be off, ask why? I had a Doc simply tell me the employee could not drive. So I fixed that, I sent a taxi 30 miles one way to pick him up and take him home. While at work he counted paper clips! First Rule, don’t let them off to start with. Challenge the Doc and find away!
I charge a lot of money for my advice, but that is it in a nutshell! You ask a very difficult question, but you must plan for the objective, and then work the plan! Contact me via email for specific questions. Fitz@safetyfitz.com

We do everything we can to keep them at work doing what ever there is available to do and then some. Modified work and tasks.
It helps to keep us engaged in the employees recovery and return as well.

I have our restricted employees doing just about anything I can to ensure they remain at work. I have the luxury of having multiple divisions so I usually send out a email to the leaders looking into who needs what- this can include cleaning, counting, paperwork, doing extra safety audits, ppe assessments, inventory items, computer work etc... the list goes on. The big thing is to have a management/ corporate commitment towards a solid RTW program (even if the task seems minimal). One big dialogue piece is that we want our employees to keep their full pay and to give them meaningful work vs. sitting at home. A byproduct of not sitting at home is that during common wok hours TV ads usually have some sort of "you may be entitled to compensation" for xyz- I try to steer away from that seed getting planted (not that I have that problem/ issue)