Executive Briefing
This paper focuses on the business case for strategic investment in injury prevention and quality claims administration. The central pillar of this process is calculating the Total Cost of Risk (TCOR), which helps the employer calculate indirect costs accurately.
Many companies dramatically underestimate the actual financial impact of workplace injuries. While the direct costs of claims and premiums are visible, the actual indirect costs are rarely included when a company is attempting to determine a return on investment in safety, or, for that matter, adequate staffing in claims, or calculating the cost to fight fraud. Indirect costs such as lost productivity, brand harm, collateral requirements, and the erosion of institutional knowledge are unmeasured and unaddressed. Catastrophic claims further complicate these calculations, as their ripple effects across morale, media scrutiny, and financial reserves tend to magnify indirect costs well beyond standard multipliers disproportionately. These claims can severely damage a company’s reputation, erode customer and employee trust, and trigger regulatory scrutiny and reserve spikes that persist for years.
This paper reframes injury prevention (and a few other risk activities) not as a cost center but as a high-return investment strategy.
Employers who take a holistic view of their Total Cost of Risk (TCOR) and proactively invest in prevention, early intervention, and employee trust-building programs see measurable gains in workforce stability, reduced claims costs, and enhanced organizational resilience. Through examples, financial models, and real-world observations, this document highlights how board-level awareness, audit oversight, and cross-departmental collaboration are critical to fully capturing and managing the long-tail risks of injury-related losses.
Bottom line: Accurately measuring indirect costs will find that they are usually at least ten times the direct costs. Most companies should invest in prevention and claims administration to reflect that exposure.
I. Safeway Case Study: A Real-World Transformation
Even though some organizations pay millions of dollars annually in direct losses within their workers’ compensation programs, very few corporate boards treat this expense as a strategic opportunity for competitive advantage. Most senior management and boards view workers’ compensation too often as a state-mandated administrative burden—an area with little room for innovation or meaningful financial improvement. This passive approach overlooks what could be one of the highest-return investments available to any large employer: proactive prevention.
At Safeway, we demonstrated that investing in injury prevention and claims administration yields measurable results. By strategically focusing on safety, early intervention, and care coordination—and successfully advocating for key changes in California’s workers’ compensation laws and regulations—we reduced our annual direct workers’ compensation costs from over $218 million to under $105 million. These results were not the product of regulatory luck or one-time negotiations, but the result of treating workplace injury risk as a strategic business issue. We approached workers’ compensation with the same rigor and accountability as any other core operating expense. Our philosophy was simple: treat our injured workers as valuable and trusted assets whose timely recovery directly supports our company. With this mindset, we built a program that could be influenced, managed, and optimized over time.
This level of savings didn’t just happen. It resulted from five years of focused, disciplined investments in safety, claims administration, and data-driven decision-making. We developed internal champions, aligned operational goals with risk reduction targets, and built cross-departmental trust in the return on these investments. Safeway’s success demonstrates that workers’ compensation isn’t just a compliance function—it’s a strategic lever. With the right leadership and commitment, employers can dramatically improve outcomes for injured workers and the bottom line.
As a new risk manager at Safeway, one of the first lessons I received from my casualty and property brokers was the importance of TCOR and how to use it in my efforts to secure adequate resources to reduce the frequency and severity of our claims.
My first challenge with accurately measuring our TCOR was capturing all the data needed to assess our total cost of risk. It took the corporate risk management department months to wrestle the data from the various departments and divisions because I had only indirect oversight of many of the costs, which were hidden in each division. We had to identify and connect disparate data sources—claims files, HR records, legal fees, training expenditures, productivity loss estimates, turnover rates, replacement costs, and collateral charges—to get a clear picture of the actual financial impact of workplace injuries.
One of the additional barriers was not just that the data lived in silos—it was that the different departments and divisons defined the costs differently, often not in alignment with risk management principles. For example, a legal fee, severance payment, or supervisor backfill cost might not be tagged as injury-related by the department incurring it. Reconciling these inconsistencies was foundational in our journey to accurately quantify TCOR. Some organizations had never been asked to calculate certain types of loss-related data before, especially costs like employee replacement, turnover, or lost institutional knowledge. These areas were simply not part of standard financial reporting in most departments. As a result, risk management had to lead a discovery process across the company, introducing new definitions and educating internal stakeholders on how these hidden costs affect the total cost of risk. Without this internal shift in understanding, it would have been impossible to capture TCOR meaningfully.
Fortunately, my boss understood the importance of investing in safety to reduce claims frequency and ongoing costs. He gave me the confidence to spend money on prevention and invest in the proper care for our injured workers.
When measuring the indirect costs at Safeway, we began with our known costs. Then we added figures calculated through collaborative analysis with our most experienced team members in both the risk and accounting departments. Together, we developed what we believed to be the most accurate methodology for estimating indirect costs. From this exercise, I firmly believe that the OSHA and other formal models—which suggest that indirect costs range from four to ten times the direct losses—substantially undervalue the actual financial impact of these hidden costs.
We found that for every dollar of direct cost, there were at least five dollars in indirect costs. When presenting this analysis to executives, we translated this into business language. For example, in the grocery industry, where the profit margin is relatively small—about 5 to 8.5%—we calculated how much product sales were needed to offset the cost of workplace injuries. When our claims costs were $218 million, translating into over $2 billion in required milk sales just to break even, this comparison powerfully reframed injury prevention from a compliance obligation into a vital business strategy.
II. Indirect Costs Defined and Categorized
Indirect costs include a broad range of hidden financial impacts not included in traditional claims accounting. These often untracked costs include:
- Lost productivity from the injured worker
- Time spent by supervisors and HR managing the incident
- Overtime and temporary replacement worker costs
- Decline in team morale and engagement
- Legal and administrative costs
- Brand and reputational harm
- Training and onboarding new hires
- Lost institutional knowledge and continuity
- Collateral costs for self-insured retentions
- Fraud prevention through claims reduction
These categories can be quantified through estimates or modeling. Below is an illustrative breakdown:
Estimated Breakdown of Indirect Costs
| Category | Approximate Share |
| Lost Productivity | 25% |
| Supervisor/Manager Time | 15% |
| Overtime/Replacement | 10% |
| Morale and Engagement Impact | 10% |
| Training/New Hire Onboarding | 10% |
| Legal/Administrative | 10% |
| Brand/Reputation Damage | 10% |
| Collateral Requirements | 5% |
| Lost Institutional Knowledge | 5% |
Note: Catastrophic claims (e.g., amputations, fatalities) skew these numbers significantly higher due to greater media exposure, litigation, and loss of trust.
III. The Illusion of Savings
One of the most significant barriers to prevention investment is the illusion of savings. Cost-cutting measures like reducing safety staffing or delaying treatment approvals may lower short-term expenses but increase long-term losses. Safety success is invisible in many companies—”nothing happened”—and therefore not celebrated.
Without measuring indirect costs, businesses think they’re saving money when, in fact, they are increasing their total cost of risk. This illusion arises because financial systems easily capture direct costs but overlook what the injury truly costs across the organization.
IV. Real Barriers to Accurate TCOR
Calculating TCOR entirely is often challenging because many expenses are not in the same budget bucket. The whole picture requires HR, production, payroll, operations, safety, legal, and finance data. Fragmented systems, privacy concerns, and inconsistent definitions often prevent complete TCOR measurement, making a culture of interdepartmental collaboration even more essential.
V. Overcoming Barriers to Prevention Investment
Several factors still hold companies back:
- Budget silos: HR, Operations, and Risk don’t always share safety goals or expenses.
- Short-term focus: Leadership changes and quarterly KPIs work against long-term investments.
- Misunderstood ROI: Prevention success often looks like “nothing happened,” which is hard to celebrate in a reactive business culture.
To overcome these, safety professionals must serve as internal consultants, translating safety wins into business impacts, aligning metrics, and advocating for prevention as a revenue protection strategy.
VI. Conclusion: Prevention Is the Highest-Return Investment
The return on investment in injury prevention becomes clear once an employer fully understands their total cost of risk. Ignoring indirect costs creates a false economy, where cost-cutting in safety leads to larger financial and human losses later.
Every injury avoided protects your bottom line, people, and reputation.
When safety is seen as an investment rather than an expense, leadership prioritizes it. And when leadership prioritizes safety, everyone benefits—from the frontline worker to the shareholders.
