One Color Per Year
When I was VP of Claims at CE Heath, we had a problem that was simple to state and harder to solve.
Required notices had to be posted. That was the law. But failure to comply created consequences far beyond a regulatory citation.
When a worker was injured and looked at the wall, what they found — or did not find — shaped everything that followed. Outdated or missing notices meant delayed reporting, confusion about where to seek care, and — where employer direction of care applies — the loss of medical control. OSHA could cite for failure to provide required notices. And beyond the regulatory exposure, the claims consequences of a worker making uninformed decisions in the first minutes after an injury were real and measurable.
We could tell insureds which posters were required. We could send updates. We could audit compliance. But when someone walked into a facility, there was no immediate way to know if the postings were current.
No one reads every notice in the field. They walk in, look around, and make a judgment.
So we made the judgment reliable.
Each year, all required notices were printed on a single color. Light salmon one year. Light green the next. Light yellow after that.
When a safety professional walked in, they didn’t need to read anything. If the current year was green and the wall was salmon, they knew in five seconds: the postings were outdated.
Compliance became a visual check, not a document review.
At Safeway, we applied the same system across hundreds of locations. Same idea. Different scale. Same result.
The more important discovery was this: Facilities that kept postings current were also better at reporting claims, more engaged in safety, and lower in claim costs. Facilities with outdated postings had the opposite profile.
The poster was not causing the behavior. It was revealing it.
An employer who updates their required notices every year is paying attention. They read what the carrier sends. They follow through on small obligations without being chased. That is not just a compliance observation.
That is a character-of-risk observation.
One color per year became a reliable indicator of how an organization actually operated.
Why This Matters More Than It Appears
Workplace postings are usually treated as a compliance requirement. They are not.
They are the first point of contact in the workers’ compensation process. When a worker is injured, they look at the wall. What they find shapes every decision that follows — where to report, where to seek care, and whether the employer retains medical control.
A current, visible, accurate posting is not administrative. It is operational.
The Cost of a Single Lapse
The cost of losing medical control on a single significant claim — a back injury, a shoulder tear, a soft tissue case with a psychological overlay — routinely exceeds the cost of an entire year’s poster compliance across a large account. The math is not close.
The question worth putting directly to any insured who treats the annual poster update as a low-priority task: How much does your medical provider network cost to maintain — and do you understand that an outdated posting can make it worthless on any given claim?
What Gets Missed
Most organizations approach postings the same way:
- Print them.
- Distribute them.
- Check the box.
What they do not verify:
- Are they current?
- Are they visible?
- Does anyone actually use the postings?
The difference between compliance and performance is not the presence of a poster. It is whether the poster works.
Why Simple Compliance Systems Fail
If the solution is this simple, why is it not universal?
Because the system does not reward it.
Maintaining current postings prevents problems, reduces delays, and improves outcomes. But those benefits are indirect. They do not show up immediately in a report or a bonus metric.
So the behavior is deprioritized. The rational response becomes: update it later, assume it’s fine, focus on what is measured.
People do what they are incentivized to do.
Even when the better approach is obvious — and proven.
A Better Way to Think About Compliance
Compliance should not be treated as documentation. It should be treated as visibility.
The color system works because it aligns with how people actually operate:
- They look.
- They assess.
- They act.
It removes friction. It makes compliance immediate, obvious, and verifiable. And most importantly: it makes non-compliance visible.
What Gets Seen Gets Acted On
Workers’ compensation invests heavily in complexity — analytics, modeling, and program design — while simple, high-impact actions go unused.
This is not an argument against sophistication. It is an argument for sequence.
A worker who cannot find current information on the wall is not helped by predictive analytics.
The starting point is always the same: What are we making visible?
In my experience, visibility drives behavior faster than policy.
One color per year.
Simple. Visible. Effective.
Inside a system that needs more of exactly that — and rewards far too little of it.
Field Implementation — Simple
- Assign one color per year for all required postings.
- Distribute a complete annual poster packet to every location.
- Require site-level confirmation of the update — signed, dated, named.
- Train supervisors on injury response and posting locations.
- Verify visually during every site visit.
