Workers Compensation Specialty Consulting for Employers

Workers compensation delivers the most value when organizations are just as focused on preventing injuries as managing them. When workplace injuries happen, they often have far-reaching impacts beyond the incident itself. The way a company and its employees approach and prioritize safety can affect the organization’s morale, reputation and financial stability today and into the future.

That’s what Travelers Workers Compensation Specialty Consulting (Specialty Consulting) is built for. Designed to integrate with Travelers Workers Compensation coverage, Specialty Consulting combines risk control resources, data-driven claims insights and safety strategies to help employers keep their employees productive and engaged.

What is Workers Compensation Specialty Consulting?

Specialty Consulting works alongside a Travelers Workers Compensation policy to help employers create more resilient workplaces and a culture of safety. It connects risk control solutions and claims capabilities in a single, coordinated approach, so the lessons from past injuries shape the strategies that help prevent the next ones.

Specialty Consulting partners with companies to better equip employees to stay healthy and on the job through the full arc of their careers.

How a culture of safety supports business performance

A strong safety culture does more than reduce incidents. It improves the outcomes business leaders care about most: retention, productivity and the cost of risk. CFOs and risk managers identify workforce capabilities as their greatest competitive advantage and workforce safety as the biggest threat to protecting it.¹ Sustaining that advantage takes more than a single policy or an annual training class.

An enduring culture of safety takes root through the daily choices employers make about how to prepare their people to avoid injuries and how to respond when an accident occurs. Employees want to know their company cares about their personal well-being and their career longevity, from day one to retirement.

The cost of workplace injuries

According to the Travelers Injury Impact Report, when safety practices are inconsistent, the costs show up in measurable ways:

37%

of workplace injuries involve first-year employees, up from 34% five years ago.²

31%

of workplace injuries come from overexertion, the most common cause.³

80 days

is the average time per injury an employee hurt on the job misses work each year.⁴

A three-pillar framework for workplace safety

Specialty Consulting is built around three safety pillars – paired with workers compensation coverage – that help organizations prevent injuries, manage evolving risks and strengthen employee engagement.

3 overlapping circles, each representing the 3 safety pillars: Protecting New Hires, Planning to Manage Injuries, and Employee Support and Engagement.

Protecting new hires

An employee’s first year on the job carries the highest injury risk for almost any workforce.⁵ Specialty Consulting partners with employers to design structured onboarding safety programs that help new team members feel prepared, supported and well-trained from the start.

Risk consultations can include:

Defining safe work practices
AI-assisted ergonomic assessment
Industrial hygiene support
Effective coaching

Planning to manage injuries

A coordinated, respectful approach to injury management can be the difference between an employee who returns stronger and one who quietly disengages. Specialty Consulting helps employers implement recovery-focused injury management strategies, informed by current and historical claims data, that connect employees to the right care at the right time and place.

Risk consultations can include:

Immediate response planning
Trusted medical provider relationships
Transitional duty strategy

Employee support & engagement

Safety culture cannot be handed down from leadership alone. Employees need to feel that their voice matters, that the company is listening and that colleagues share the same commitment. Specialty Consulting helps employers create the engagement and sense of ownership that make a safety culture take hold.

Risk consultations can include:

Safety leadership development
Data-driven coaching, with metrics that matter
Employee engagement surveys

The three-pillar approach is one reason 72% of injured employees with Travelers workers compensation coverage return to work within 30 days and 85% return within 60 days.⁶

Specialized workplace safety expertise

Specialty Consulting draws on Travelers’ 600+ risk professionals with specializations across many sectors and risk categories, more than 100 years of workers compensation experience and tens of thousands of client consultations.

This hands-on expertise, paired with claims data analysis, helps clients understand their highest-stakes risks and where deep technical knowledge can produce measurable improvements. There are several ways Travelers partners with organizations and their employees to make this happen:

Develop managers into safety leaders

Frontline supervisors are the single biggest influence on day-to-day safety behavior, yet most have never been formally trained as safety leaders. Specialty Consulting leadership development programs help supervisors foster productive safety conversations, recognize early warning signs and reinforce best practices.

Monitor occupational disease exposures

Employees can face airborne hazards, noise, chemicals and other long-term health risks that may not surface in injury reports until years later. The AIHA LAP-accredited⁷ Travelers industrial hygiene lab provides air, noise and chemical monitoring programs that give employers the data they need without the cost of buying, maintaining and calibrating their own equipment.

Help prevent severe jobsite accidents

Falls, struck-by incidents and work zone collisions remain among the leading causes of severe workplace injuries, along with overexertion. Slips, trips and falls alone account for 27% of workplace injuries, according to Travelers claims data.⁸ Travelers specialists work directly with an employer’s operations teams on fall protection planning, site assessments and traffic control practices that can help reduce catastrophic events.

Reduce soft-tissue injuries

Lifting, pushing and repetitive-motion injuries make up the largest share of preventable claims. Using specialized ergonomic consulting and AI-assisted assessments, Travelers risk consultants assess high-risk tasks across a company’s location. This information can lead to specific recommendations, from tool design to task rotation, that can lower injury rates before they reach claims data.

The three pillars in action: real-world results

A Midwestern manufacturer put all three pillars to work and reversed a costly injury trend. The company’s claims costs had climbed to alarming levels, injuries were happening more frequently, and frontline workers were losing confidence in the company’s ability to keep them safe. The safety team had good ideas but lacked the bandwidth to carry them out.

Working with Travelers, the company’s leadership, operations and safety teams analyzed claims data and developed a structured plan across all three pillars:

New-hire onboarding was recalibrated around the highest-risk tasks.
Injury management was coordinated end to end, from first response through return to work, with a focus on recovery and well-being.
Employee engagement became part of daily operations rather than a stand-alone program.

The result was a success for both the company’s culture and finances. Over two years, claims dropped 91% and costs fell from a high of $707,000 to $74,000.⁹ Just as important was the change in how employees began to talk about and approach safety from that point forward.

Who benefits from Workers Compensation Specialty Consulting?

Specialty Consulting supports middle-market and large employers across a wide range of industries. Whether an organization’s safety efforts are new or already mature, Specialty Consulting tailors programs to each employer’s risks and claims history to help prevent injuries and coordinate recovery-focused responses when they occur.

Over time, this partnership can have a compounding effect, leading to less severe injuries, lower claims costs, fewer operational disruptions and greater employee morale and commitment.

Start building a stronger workforce safety strategy

When a safety culture is built the right way, it’s visible across the organization. It shows up in financial resilience, a healthier workforce and in the people who stay, speak openly about risk and picture a long career with the company. This becomes an edge that competitors will find difficult to copy.

A workforce protected from day one to retirement is within reach. Getting there is a partnership. Travelers brings more than 1,000 risk control tools and resources to the table, designed to match an employer’s specific workplace safety goals.

To explore all Travelers Specialty Consulting options, contact an agent or connect with a member of the Travelers Specialty Consulting team today:

Chris Hayes

Assistant Vice President, Risk Control

[email protected] | LinkedIn profile

Allen McCalister

Technical Director, Workers Compensation Consulting, Risk Control

[email protected] | LinkedIn profile

Mary Ellen Ausenbaugh, CSP, ARM

Technical Director, Human Factors & Ergonomics, Risk Control

[email protected] | LinkedIn profile

Dave Anderson

Technical Director, Industrial Hygiene Specialist Group, Risk Control

[email protected] | LinkedIn profile

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Why choose Travelers

Care for the employee, confidence for the employer

Employees are at the heart of every business. That's why Travelers is here to help employers keep them safe and support them when accidents happen. Our experienced teams guide both employers and their injured employees through recovery, from getting the right care to returning to work as soon as medically appropriate. In fact, 70% of injured employees return to work within 30 days.

Travelers approach

Explore workers comp

Resources

Travelers workers compensation hub

Travelers workers compensation claim process

Risk Management Information Services (RMIS)

Travelers Risk Control

Create a culture of workplace safety

More Prepare & Prevent

Insights to help you manage risks at work and on the road

Workplace Safety Resources

Create a Safety Culture at Work

A strong safety culture can help with job retention. Get engagement and support tips from Travelers to help create a safety program.

Workplace Safety Resources

The Travelers Injury Impact Report

Travelers knows firsthand that injuries can occur in any business, regardless of industry or size. Learn more in the Travelers Injury Impact Report.

Manufacturing Resources

4 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Workers Compensation Carrier

Learn how choosing the right workers compensation insurance partner for your ergonomic needs can help you better manage claims and potentially reduce the risks for your organization.

Sources
¹ Travelers 2026 Enterprise Marketing Research report on Workplace Safety Across Industries.
^2,3,4,5,8 https://www.travelers.com/resources/business-topics/workplace-safety/injury-impact-report
⁶ Travelers National Accounts Claim Data – 3-year average, 2021-2023, accident year at 12 months.
⁷ https://www.aihaaccreditedlabs.org/
⁹ Travelers single customer Post-Injury Management project results 2024, Travelers eCARMA^® total incurred dollars, policy years 22, 23 and 24 valued as of February 2024. Travelers does not warrant that adherence to, or compliance with, any recommendations, process, best practices, checklist or guidelines will result in a particular outcome.

Workers Compensation Specialty Consulting for Employers

What is Workers Compensation Specialty Consulting?

Chris Hayes

Allen McCalister

Mary Ellen Ausenbaugh, CSP, ARM

Dave Anderson

Resources

Workers compensation state resources

Workplace Safety Resources

Create a Safety Culture at Work

Workplace Safety Resources

The Travelers Injury Impact Report

Manufacturing Resources

4 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Workers Compensation Carrier