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2020 US Insurance Awards: Adecco USA Inc. / Marsh LLC, Risk Management Team of the Year

Posted On: Oct. 16, 2020 12:00 AM CST

Susan Shemanski, Shanna Levesque

When Susan Shemanski, vice president of corporate risk management at The Adecco Group, joined the staffing company four years ago, its safety department was manually reviewing 6,000 safety evaluations for its clients every year.

A need to improve safety and to reduce the paper trail by using technology was a priority, said Ms. Shemanski, who is based in Jacksonville, Florida.

In 2017, Adecco partnered with Marsh Risk Consulting and put in place an online platform that allows its team to automatically review clients and evaluate safety messages.

“We went from reviewing 6,000 paper documents every year to only 11% of those,” Ms. Shemanski said.

Adecco and Marsh won the Business Insurance 2020 U.S. Insurance Award for Risk Management Team of the Year.

Working with Marsh, Adecco then focused on its top 15 clients to identify the risks they faced and the strategies needed to improve safety for their workers and lower the cost of accidents at client locations. 

“Being a temporary staffing company, we don’t have control of the workplace,” Ms. Shemanski said. “One of the reasons we chose Marsh as our safety vendor is that they do a lot with behavior-based safety, so influencing the way in which our workers would do the work more so than making changes to the workplace.”

The challenge is “a little different for Adecco” because the company does not control the work environment, said Shanna Levesque, a senior vice president in the consulting solutions practice of Marsh Advisory, a unit of Marsh LLC.

“It’s not their manufacturing equipment, it’s not their forklift. We have to take a non-traditional approach to behavior-based safety to make it work, to bridge that for them,” Ms. Levesque said.

As Marsh and Adecco analyzed the loss data, it became clear that many of the worker injuries were coming from ergonomic movement, such as lifting boxes, stocking shelves and other material handling.

That’s when Adecco partnered with Clemson, South Carolina-based technology company Modjoul Inc. to deploy its SmartBelt technology to workers. 

The SmartBelt measures how workers move — for example, if they are bending or twisting unsafely during the course of their work, Ms. Shemanski said.

Marsh then analyzes the data gathered to determine whether to bring in an ergonomist or other specialist to address any problem it discovers and make safety recommendations.

This combination of technology and being strategic on safety resulted in a 41% drop in losses at one client, Ms. Shemanski said.

“The belts alone aren’t going to reduce losses, but it’s taking that data and putting the right safety measures in place,” she said.

FINALISTS

• CorVel Corp. — CorVel and Aon PLC worked with foodservice company Sysco Corp., deploying technology and big data to improve its risk management and workers compensation claims processes.

• Compass Group/Marsh LLC/Markel Corp. — Compass Group partnered with Marsh and Markel to create a liability insurance policy tailored to the needs of a pop-up restaurant concept.

• Silverstein Properties Inc. — Silverstein Properties’ risk management team found creative ways to work with brokers, engineers and insurers to secure the renewal of its terrorism and all-risk property insurance program.

• Baystate Health/Spring Consulting Group — Baystate Health’s risk manager continued to expand the integrated health care delivery system’s use of its captive insurer to better manage its total cost of risk, informed by analysis from Spring Consulting.