I’d like to introduce you to a rock star coach. No, not Andy Reid or Kyle Shanahan. “Coach” Keisha Dewey-Sanders, Claims Operations Supervisor at LWCC and the individual responsible for incorporating a Workers’ Recovery Professional (WRP) mindset into the onboarding process of new and recent hires. This is the story of how someone with a vision and empowered to execute it can create a lasting impact in an organization.
LWCC is Louisiana’s largest workers’ comp provider. Like many large organizations, they experienced turnover during COVID and had to innovate their onboarding process to help new hires – many of whom had little or no direct workers’ comp experience – effectively and efficiently learn their roles.
Their interest was piqued about a workers’ recovery mindset when I spoke at their annual OMNET Provider Forum in January 2023. Leadership sampled our curriculum and discovered it bolstered their evolving injured worker centric claims model. Keisha was the logical choice to create a new training program that fuses a “whole person” mindset with the soft skills to make it happen. She has been a Claims Rep since 2001 and it was “very eye opening” because “we didn’t have that kind of training when I first started.”
Jill Leonard, Vice President of Claims Operations, and Paul Buffone, SVP, Chief Claims Officer, quickly realized “we did not want to just hand off a program to them and say ‘good luck … let us know when you’re done’.” Rather, they embraced a highly collaborative and moderated study group approach and thus the legend of “Coach” Keisha was launched.
I had the opportunity to interview Keisha to better understand exactly what she created.
The first cohort at LWCC was launched in Fall 2023, consisting of 10 individuals who had been with the company between six months and one year. Although Coach had not done anything like this before, Keisha is surrounded by educators within her family and leaned on them for advice. Any educator would be proud of what she created!
Following is an overview of her process
Coach led by example, going through the same curriculum as her students. “I have learned a lot and I’ve been a rep for over 20 years. The information I learned was insightful, helpful, and it would help everyone in their claim handling experience. Once you’ve handled claims for so long, you tend to put people in categories, so you may need to change your mindset. I think it will have a positive impact on our claim handling experience. It will decrease litigation, contain costs, and create many other positive outcomes.” One big takeaway by everyone was that “the injured worker ultimately decides if and when they return to work,” and LWCC focuses on tailoring support to help them do that in the best way possible.
Coach utilized Microsoft Teams to create a calendar to cover all 19 courses over a 10-week period.
LWCC provided each student with up to one hour per day of undistracted company time – five hours per week – to work through the assigned courses and homework. They still had claims to manage and productivity to prove, but the key was Coach working with each student and their manager to ensure they had proper balance during the workday. Keisha was initially concerned they would be overwhelmed, but “nobody had a single complaint.”
Coach created a discussion board to help guide and organize their process, including a “lesson reflection” that included open-ended questions like …
What’s the most important thing you learned today? “I learned about the importance of putting the injured worker first. Sometimes I do not think about the injured worker as my client, I think of the policyholder as the client. But it is kind of the other way around. Treating the injured worker as a client and putting our best foot forward could really be the change in the claim.”
What was surprising? “Insurance rates being based on the law of large numbers.”
What can / should you do with what you know? “Identifying barriers by asking open ended questions and giving the injured worker the opportunity to explain their unique situation.”
What do you want to learn more about, and why? “What more could we offer, do, or change from the injured worker’s point of view to make the workers’ comp process better for them instead of what we as the company thinks we could change / offer.”
Coach provided supplemental information to reinforce the courses. For example, she found additional resources for a deeper dive into emotional intelligence and communicating with empathy after taking the “Emotional Intelligence” course in the school of Humanities. Coach also provided “cheat sheets” about how LWCC processes claims so students were learning broad best practices from the WRPA faculty, while at the same time understanding how they were specifically applied at LWCC.
At the end of each week, they would meet as a group for an hour. Each student was expected to share their thoughts on the curriculum. As is usual in a group environment, they learned from each other. Coach said “it was really cool to see their eyes light up when they were sharing” their answers to these three questions:
Things I learned this week
How will I apply what I learned in my role
Things I still have questions about
Coach engaged with each student’s supervisor to explain what they learned that week so it could be reinforced in their own one-on-one discussions and ensure what was learned was applied in their daily job.
Coach not only preached accountability but lived it as well, keeping the management team aware of her progress, adjustments, and results from the program.
At the end of the 10-week program, the cohort formally presented their lessons learned to the claims management team. Very few employees get the opportunity to present to their leadership team early in their career. Some of the comments included in their individual presentations were:
“I was immediately able to put some of these skills to work the same day and notice a difference in my claims handling interaction with stakeholders.”
“I’ve applied these (soft skills) concepts in my personal life.”
“In my opinion, it gave us the ‘right thing’ to do in dealing with injured workers. So many times, when something doesn’t go as expected, I instantly think what I did wrong. This model shows us from the moment a claim is submitted, how to provide guidance, support, and quality care that an injured worker needs through every step of their recovery.”
“It makes you think of things you wouldn’t necessarily think of.”
In 2024 LWCC started a cohort of new hires, which will be the standard going forward. Given the success, they’re also discussing how to make the program optionally available to everyone regardless of tenure or role.
What became evident to me during our discussion is that the ripple effects from this program go well beyond the professional development of those 10 initial students:
- The perception, and reality, that LWCC is invested in the professional and personal growth of each of their employees.
- Team bonding developed among the cohort that will reap benefits as they return to their individual departments.
- Built in mentorship with cohort graduates paying it forward to future cohort members.
- The presentation to leadership further reduced barriers between management and their team.
- Holistic learning will ultimately have a positive impact on LWCC’s business results.
Their leadership presentation finished with a quote from Benjamin Franklin … “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” IMHO, Coach nailed it.
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