How WCB costs, absenteeism, and workplace injury quietly erode your bottom line — and what to do about it
This article was originally published in OHS Canada. An expanded version appears below.
If you’re an Alberta employer who isn’t actively managing your WCB file, your disability management program, your modified duties, and your attendance metrics, you are almost certainly leaving money on the table. Significant money. The kind that doesn’t show up as a single line item on your income statement, which is precisely why most business owners never connect the dots until the problem has already become expensive.
I call these phantom costs. And after nearly a decade of working inside workers’ compensation files across every sector in this country, I can tell you they are real, they are substantial, and they are almost universally invisible to the leaders who are paying them.
In a world beset with disruption and uncertainty, business leaders grapple with unprecedented challenges both on a micro and macro scale. Integrating AI, meeting financial targets, coping with tariffs, driving growth in a low-growth economic environment — for these reasons and more, one could perhaps understand why the safety and well being of workers doesn’t always make the list of top priorities. And for that reason, all too often as I regularly witness, OHS, WCB, and DM concerns take a perpetual back seat to what’s viewed as more pressing concerns.
Indeed, ensuring the safety and efficient management of workplace injuries is always professed to be paramount, but often that only amounts to lip service. OHS gets about 5 mins in the company meeting, whereas discussion around operating margins, competitive analysis, marketing discourse, all hog the limelight. But to give short shrift to OHS is to flirt with disaster. Health and safety might not be as sexy as, say, the adoption of AI agentic workflows, but remains foundational nonetheless. If you believe any company can be successful, or at least enjoy sustained success, whilst having high levels of workplace injuries and absenteeism, then I have a bridge to sell you.
OHS metrics, including WCB rating and attendance issues, are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the biomarkers of organizational illness or culture issues. As a disability consultant and WCB specialist who serves employers across every sector, I tell them that disability management is first and foremost about the human considerations. Ensuring your people get home safe every night to their families stands above all else. With that said, there are sound reasons, in addition to the obvious ones, to seriously manage disability and to view it as a profit driver and not an afterthought.
And so this series is intended for the OHS and HR people out there who often find themselves saddled with WCB tasks but without additional resources or time to serve those functions well. These same frazzled people often reach out to me, lamenting the fact that their organizations claim to be safety conscious, but when they try to lobby for help, or to invest in even some basic systems for disability management, those requests fall on deaf ears. I tell them that’s because they’re not speaking the right language, and that in order to pique the attention of senior management, quantifying their arguments in financial language is key. As it’s often said, everyone’s in Sales, whether they like it or not.
More on the canaries. Poor health and attendance stats and WCB metrics are indicative of systemic issues. And these systemic issues insidiously syphon off profits from income statements in what I term phantom costs. WCB premiums are measurable and objective, but what about the high absenteeism that undercuts productivity. Industry data consistently points to absenteeism alone accounting for roughly a 3% drag on EBITDA — and in my experience, the real number is probably higher. And what about when WCB premiums quietly move into surcharge territory and a company is suddenly paying 20-40% more in risk costs, often without leadership even noticing. Or when safety stats become so bad that the company starts to lose out on bids, or loses key accounts, or suffers the incalculable reputational damage of a higher profile incident. Disability management is profit management by another name, and this is the framing that HR and safety professionals should get in the habit of using when advocating for proper resourcing within their organizations.
A practical note worth adding here: one of the first things I do when engaging a new employer client is ask whether they’ve ever pulled their WCB experience rating report. In Alberta this is sometimes called the WCB report card. Most have never seen it. That report tells you exactly where you stand relative to your industry peers, whether you’re in discount or surcharge territory, and what your claims history looks like over the past several years. It’s free, it’s available directly through WCB Alberta, and it’s one of the most useful documents a business owner can have in hand before any conversation about disability management strategy. If you don’t know where you stand, you can’t begin to manage it.
I’ve seen this pattern play out across every sector I work in. Take for instance a client whose company rose rapidly within its sector. The owner called me himself. I was struck by the concern in his voice. His company’s fortunes were rising meteorically, but so was injury and disability. And so this was one CEO that didn’t need convincing that OHS is a vital concern. I asked if he ever pulled his WCB report card — never heard of it. Who was managing WCB? Safety and HR person, managing everything. I said I’d like to speak with that person, and when I did, within 5 minutes she broke into tears because of the pressure of trying to do three jobs, and then getting dumped on for failing. But the CEO realized that this was getting out of control, could sense that it was indicative of managerial failures, worried about the implications of culture, burnout, and that at this rate, he wouldn’t be able to bid on jobs or do work for key customers on energy sites due to TRIFs etc. But always at the root of it, his genuine concern for his people.
This was years ago. This gentleman and client became a friend, as I allowed the line between professional and personal to blur for all the right reasons. I learned from him, and he learned from me. What I taught him is that his rapidly ascending business was on a collision course with oblivion without major yet inexpensive changes to how his company managed health and safety. He told me his revenues were soaring, but operating profits were meagre at best. He wasn’t getting ahead. Revenue was only exacerbating the deficiencies. I told him he needed a reasonably scalable OHS system, clear policy, reporting procedures, assigned roles, some limited training, and a modified duties bank. I explained that disability management begins in the recruitment stage, to inform new hires that they care about their well being, and that accidents will happen, and that they have a program in place to support them when injuries arise. We worked on a manual, he hired an HR person to split duties with Safety, and he retained my services to assist with management of complex injuries on a case by case basis.
I’ll never forget, the poor safety lady who cried on the phone to me, called me, in confidence, and expressed extreme gratitude for convincing her boss, my now friend, to level up the OHS system. That felt good. After the messaging and training and rather inexpensive improvements made, disability was dropping, incidents were down, absenteeism was down, the mood and energy in the office was markedly better. And she was no longer looking for a different job.
My friend the CEO also confided in me that, after 24 months, EBITDA had increased by 5%, which translated into hundreds of thousands. I told him I won the bet, that he’d see that within 2-3 years, and how would he like to pay up. We chuckled. But it was the calmness and relaxation in his voice, the pride of a business owner who not only succeeded in making money, but in building a legacy of safety and goodness.
If any of this sounds familiar — whether you’re the frazzled safety person trying to get resources, or the business owner who suspects your WCB costs are quietly getting away from you — Blue Collar Consulting works with employers across Canada to bring exactly this kind of clarity to a complicated system. The conversation starts with pulling that report card.
This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on disability management and workplace injury. Read the full series on OHS Canada.
