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Digital EditionPulling Together: How Risk All Star Jessica Morgan Led a Safety Revolution at ABM
Facilities services and solutions provider ABM was a company in transformation when Jessica Morgan — now its SVP of risk and safety — came on board in 2016.
Approaching its 120th anniversary, ABM was looking ahead and had identified a need to modernize its approach to safety and compliance. With over 100,000 employees spread throughout the world, the company faced an inconsistent safety record due to employee turnover and a lack of sustained safety programs.
“There was a real disconnect between operations, safety and claims management,” Morgan said.
“Safety and claims reported to two different individuals, which resulted in a lack of accountability that could lead to finger-pointing.”
Combining risk and safety under one person — Morgan — was a first step. She quickly identified the need for a shift in company culture, one that would demonstrate the value of safety to the operations team. The COVID era, an intensely strenuous and hazardous time for facilities workers, did that.
With safety and operations pulling in the same direction, Morgan was able to fundamentally shift ABM’s approach in two important areas: safety and return to work. Instead of a piecemeal approach to injury prevention (“throwing out all these great programs just to see what would stick,” as she described it), Morgan partnered closely with the operations side to identify which strategies had the potential for success, “to make sure it became part of the fabric of ABM’s culture, not just something we threw out there to see if they’d pick it up.”
“Operations, from leadership on down, started embracing it,” said Cheryl Morler, ABM’s senior director of risk management. “Supervisors are held accountable so that when they’re in buildings, they’re continually looking to see that we’re working safely. Implementing that program has really helped to reduce claims.”
Simultaneously, Morgan set out to revamp ABM’s return-to-work policy. To improve return to work — not only to reduce total cost of risk but to improve the experiences and outcomes of workers — Morgan’s team “worked with operators to draft new job descriptions. We worked with our operations leaders, our TPA and our safety team to identify different jobs within the workplace that our injured employees could do.”
Where no such jobs existed, the TPA coordinated with a nonprofit to find other ways to reintegrate injured employees back into the workforce. The results speak for themselves: a 35% drop in claim frequency since 2017, and a 23% reduction in temporary total disability days over the past five years — despite two major acquisitions during the same period.
“A lot of credit goes to my group,” Morgan said. “We work on it together, of course. And the successes … are truly a team effort.” &
See all the 2024 Risk All Stars here.
