By 2011 we had already been hired, fired and rehired by our most long-standing employer client. The details are fuzzy but we believe that the leadership in that safety department didn’t really want to hire us in the first place in 2008 but there wasn’t really a choice, they had to do something to solve the musculoskeletal injury & health problem their company was facing.
When the solution we provided wasn’t miraculous or immediate, the manager Dan let us go. When he called us back in 2010 we were able to establish the beginning of a relationship that would prove incredibly fruitful for everyone. Not only did we forge a strong professional relationship, together we were able to achieve the legendary and almost mythical “everyone can win” scenario that “health” so uniquely promises.The short short version is - the client company obviously wins and almost immediately when things go right. Less injuries and subsequent reliance on the medical system means less downtime and ultimately less cost to run the business. This has both direct and indirect value as the after-shocks from an injury event can be powerful and destructive.
Next, the employees on the ground can win, although typically a little further down the line. A healthier body & mind means higher peak function and a slower loss with age. In the simplest terms, higher quality of life for a longer period of time, something that was (and is) progressively more rare in the US, is still pretty easy to assign a value to - if nothing else, avoiding the cost in both dollars and side-effects of medications and other “therapies” to correct preventable ills.
For us, the providers, there is the potential for both immediate AND long-lasting gains; one of the reasons why we so passionately pursue the approach. There is, of course, the short-term business case of trading professional skills for money with far fewer administrative burdens than the traditional healthcare model dictates. Yet, far more valuable after basic needs are met is the knowledge that we are able to give our clients what together we decide is needed, when it is needed without delay or the risk of some third party far-removed determining if it is “allowed”. Said another way, we fully believed that when the sky-high barriers standing between providers and the people who need their skills are systematically removed, great results can follow. We just needed to prove it.That’s exactly what happened over the next five years. The approach yielded a near linear relationship between our team’s connection to the employee population (as measured in contact-hours) and their health and safety. Specifically, musculoskeletal injuries, which are almost always found among the top 3 drivers of injuries in the workplace, often the number 1, fell by nearly 67% by 2016. A result that was previously unheard of was made nearly obvious in the data. Pro-Activity’s approach, a “crazy idea” to put people at the center of an evidence-based strategy which leveraged group dynamics a decade prior, could not only achieve the “win-win-win”, but could do so in a predictable and sustainable way.
Of course with any journey to the top, the path is never straight and gets more treacherous as you climb, and while the steady drop in musculoskeletal injuries continued with this client for the next five year period, even eventually achieving the unthinkable “target zero” (no injuries) in 2022, in that time we’ve collectively had to navigate a superstorm (Sandy), a global pandemic, and countless other moments that can show us exactly how fleeting and fragile success can be - and how quickly a situation and the people in it can go from thriving to surviving. And so while we remain happy and proud of the efforts thus far, we strive to never be satisfied.
-Mike E.
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