Rancho Mesa's Alyssa Burley and Drew Garcia sit down to discuss how the Key Performance Indicator Dashboard can help improve workers; compensation programs.

Show Notes: ⁠⁠https: KPI Dashboard; ⁠Subscribe to Rancho Mesa's Newsletter⁠

Director/Host: ⁠⁠⁠Alyssa Burley⁠⁠⁠

Guest: ⁠⁠⁠Drew Garcia⁠⁠⁠

Producer/Editor: ⁠Megan Lockhart⁠

Music: "Home" by JHS Pedals, “News Room News” by Spence

Transcript

Alyssa Burley: Hi, this is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa's Media Communications and Client Services Department. Thank you for listening to today's top Rancho Mesa news, brought to you by our Safety and Risk Management Network, StudioOne.

Welcome back, everyone. My guest is Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group with Rancho Mesa. He specializes in providing insurance services to the lawn and land care industry. And, today we're going to discuss how listeners can use Rancho Mesa's key performance indicator dashboard, or the KPI dashboard, to improve their workers' compensation program.

Drew, welcome to the show.

Drew Garcia: Alyssa, thanks for having me.

AB: Of course. Now, several years ago, you designed the KPI dashboard to give clients a better way of understanding their experience modification rate and all the factors that go into that number along with benchmarking the client so they know how they compare against other businesses in their industry.

So, how can landscape, lawn and tree care business leaders use the KPI dashboard to identify the underlying performance trends?

DG: Well, I'm excited to get into that and I think I'm going to start it off with, why we created that dashboard. And, it really came out of necessity. So you have the client continuing to ask you, how can I see this information a little bit more clear? This is, you know, it used to be Excel format. There's a lot of numbers, easy to kind of get distracted. So, the intent was with the KPI was to make the information much more clear, centralize it to one document, so that we didn't have multiple pages that people had to flip through, focus on the need to know information versus nice to know info so that we're really getting something out of the meeting and then be consistent with that and delivered at a certain cadence so that the business owner could continue to grow with it.

So,what we've seen is a lot of our landscape lawn care, tree care companies, the owner might be involved in the meetings that we have or they might have a team that's involved in overseeing the safety program. So, it could be safety leaders, human resources, controllers, and many times, business leaders are tasking their management team to handle their safety program.

So, what we want to do is provide those teams with resources that they need to carry out the job, so that they don’t feel like they are starting from, you know, zero. And, a lot of questions that we got prior to getting the KPI is a where can I start with my safety program? What should I be looking at? And, then how can I scale my safety program?

Okay. So, the business wants to grow and we're going to open up different locations and different branches. How can I create a system so that my safety can keep up with the strategic growth of the business?

So, the KPI was coming in to answer all those questions. And it really helps because even if you have turnover within that management position, the information doesn't change.

So, it's just a quick learning curve for that new HR manager or safety professional to say, hey, this is the info that we review every 90 days, make it make sense to you. But, now we don't have to retrain and figure out, you know, we're starting over again in a year and a half when somebody had some turnover in a position.

So, it really helps our team work with the customer and continue to build versus, you know, have the same conversation every time, which can be frustrating.

AB: Absolutely. So, what are some of the ways that you've seen clients actually use the KPI dashboard? Do you have any like specific examples?

DG: Yeah. Yeah. Let me give you guys some examples that we've seen in the past now because we've been using it for a number of years like you mentioned.

So, I'll start with commercial maintenance. So, say we have a landscape maintenance company, what's important to them or what they might want to hone in on is what the lagging information? Because, the KPI in showing information from the past. We don’t have a way with this document to show leading information. So, what our maintenance companies do is they look at the lagging loss history that’s represented on the KPI and they build leading indicator initiatives that they can task their team to fulfill so that they can make improvements on the information that they look at on the KPI.

So, an example of that would be how many toolbox talks should we say we want our teams to complete and what's the percentage of attendance rate that we want to have for those specific meetings? How many JSAs or safety observations do we want our teams to administer throughout the year, and now we just got to manage the number that we wanted completed. Another thing, could be how many online trainings do we want our employees to complete throughout an annual, you know, an annual year. And what's really nice is all that can be tracked on our SafetyOne mobile lab.

AB: I was just thinking that.

DG: So yeah, we have we have the segment where we've got the lagging information, which shows you where you've been. And, then we've got SafetyOne with the ability to help a company use leading information to make vast improvements in their safety program.

AB: Absolutely.

DG: So there's no break in the chain.

Maybe more on the construction side. So, the experience mod is really important to all landscape, lawn care, tree care businesses. But, in some cases for construction, there could be pre-qualification measures that have to do with the experience mod where the mod needs to be below a certain number or, you know, I know If a mod exceeds 125, there can be a little bit more sensitivity to OSHA. So, on the construction side, what's nice is the KPI shows your 10 most recent experience mods. It's going to show your projected mod for the coming year. And, it's also going to show you why the mod is what it is in the current year. So, what we found with construction is a lot of frustration and a lot of unknown.

Well, they've got to be bidding and projecting future cost.

AB: Right.

DG: So, this really helps those companies better see what's going on with my mod. What should I anticipate what will happen in the future because I have to prepare my business the right way.

And , then the last piece, and it can be used by, you know, either side, but you hear underwriters talk about frequency and severity. So, we have a benchmarking report at the bottom of the KPI that shows a five year look back of any business’ frequency and severity rates, so that they can see how they measure up against the rest of the landscape industry.

And, what's really cool is we have it in dial format. So, as opposed to just put in a bunch of numbers together on a piece of paper, we said, how can we bring this to life with some kind of an image? And, just picture an odometer. And, you've got green, yellow, orange, and red. And, if you're in the green or the yellow, things are good. If you're in the orange or the red, there's some things that we need to talk about.

So, it creates really good conversations with the businesses that we support, and then they end up using this document internally to maybe share with different stakeholders within the business to just say, hey, we're doing a great job and look, the numbers support it, or hey, guys, we got a little bit of a trend in frequency. We noticed that during the summer months, we're getting a lot of these types of injuries. How can we address this so that we don't have it in the future? Which allows them to kind of have that conversation in a timely manner so that they're, you know, being proactive based on the information that's in front of them.

AB: Yeah, and I feel like the visuals that are on the KPI dashboard really make it easy to quickly see what's happening. And, if you're comparing the last report that you got to the most current, you can see, hey, what kind of trend is there? You know, are we going in the right direction? Are we not? Are there things that we need to address?

So, it sounds like this is really designed to empower our clients' leadership team to better understand their workers’ compensation program and provide them with the tools they need to effectly make a difference.

And for our listeners who are interested in learning more about the KPI dashboard, we actually have a video on our website And we’ll put a link int he episode note to that. You do a great job explaining, you know, all the different pieces of the dashboard. So, we’ll make sure there is a link so our listeners can take a look at that.

So, if listeners have questions about the KPI dashboard and they want to talk to you directly, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

DG: They can email me. My email is Drew Garcia at RanchoMesa.com and we can connect over email.

AB: All right. That sounds great. And Drew, thank you so much for joining me in StudioOne.

DG: Thanks for having me.

AB: This is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa. Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by StudioOne. For more information, visit us at RanchoMesa.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.