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Travelers

The Company

Testimonial

"We've found through our internal research that bad managers are the No. 1 reason why employees report workplace stress and decide to leave their jobs. To create a workplace culture of respect and safety, managers have to know how to be effective supervisors and how to communicate openly and fairly with their employees. These types of skills don't come automatically, and businesses have a responsibility to provide their managers with proper training and resources. Elements of Effective Supervision is a valuable tool for any business committed to providing a healthy working environment."

Dan Murphy
Former Senior Vice President - Risk Control

St. Paul Travelers (NYSE:STA) is headquartered in Saint Paul, Minn., with significant operations in Hartford, CT, and provides commercial property-casualty insurance, personal property-casualty insurance and asset management services. Travelers was formed by the combination of Travelers Property Casualty Corp. and The St. Paul Companies on April 1, 2004. On a combined basis, the companies reported 2003 revenue from continuing operations of $24 billion and total assets of $107 billion. The merger created the nation's second largest property-casualty insurer and one of the largest financial services firms.

The Challenge

As an insurance company, Travelers is always looking for ways to promote safety and minimize risk in the workplace by fostering healthy working environments. Recognizing that managers and line supervisors play a critical role in creating safe and healthy workplaces, and that many of these people are being asked to take on these additional responsibilities with little or no resources or training, Travelers needed to find a cost-effective and efficient method of providing this type of management training to their insureds. Furthermore, Travelers needed a computer-based training tool that would offer flexible delivery options – both online and on CD-ROM.

The Solution

In January 2003, Travelers turned to PureSafety to assist in the development of a 4-course suite entitled Elements of Effective Supervision. The modules are designed to help supervisors achieve excellence by leading more effectively, building more productive teams, and positively impacting their organization’s safety and profitability. The four modules in the suite include:

Healthy Teams - Designed to help supervisors build healthy, productive teams in your organization. This training module stresses that supervisors and healthy teams can help increase the human capital of an organization and drive success.

Safety & You – Managers and supervisors can significantly impact a company’s safety efforts. This module demonstrates how supervisors can help successfully shape and promote your safety culture.

Supervisors Make Your MARC (Motivation, Accountability, Recognition, and Communication) – A supervisor takes on a diverse role – from setting productivity goals to training employees to ensuring safety. This training module covers seven supervisory styles and when and how to use them.

Valuing Differences – How supervisors and employees deal with differences among co-workers helps foster either a respectful or disrespectful environment. This training module can help supervisors capitalize on those differences to create a culture that fosters creativity, encourages effective communication and benefits from positive competition.

Each training module lasts 30-40 minutes and can be completed by supervisors individually at their desktops. Organizations can also choose to present these modules in group settings to allow for facilitated discussion among participants. To make the course suite more accessible for all Travelers' customers, Elements of Effective Supervision was designed for delivery on CD-ROM and online through the PureSafety Learning Management System (LMS).

The Results

The CD-ROM and online courses have been met with great success and accolades from Traveler’s customers and risk control staff alike. In addition, many PureSafety customers have shown great interest in the supervisory safety suite, clearly demonstrating that managers and line supervisors do play a critical role in creating safe and healthy workplaces.

Teaching managers to be effective supervisors can have an impact on a company’s bottom line. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employers saw a 20.3 percent increase from the year 2000 in the number of days employees were absent from work due to anxiety, stress and neurotic disorders. In another study, CCH, Inc. found that employers pay an average of $789 per employee annually for unscheduled absenteeism. That study suggested that stress accounts for 12 percent of all unscheduled absenteeism, while another in 2000 by the American Psychological Association said that as many as 25 percent of employees have called in sick or taken a “mental health day” as a result of work stress.