Insurance Insights: The Cleary Insurance Blog
The Cleary Insurance blog covers insurance, risk management, and financial planning for New England businesses and individuals. Our team of licensed advisors and specialists publishes regular articles on commercial and personal coverage, employee benefits, life and financial planning, and insurance compliance. Browse recent articles below, or use the category filters to find topics relevant to your business or personal situation.
Wellness programs are out. Wellbeing strategies are in.
Part of the problem is that traditional approaches to wellness have not delivered on the promise of reduced cost and improved productivity. Many of these wellness programs were poorly constructed and inconsistently delivered. As more vendors poured into the space, the quality of services offered began to vary widely and choosing an effective partner became more and more challenging for employers. Even the higher quality programs available were limited in their impact because they focused only on physical health problems instead of fueling the whole person.
The bottom line is this: It’s time to set aside wellness “programs” in favor of wellbeing strategies. It’s time for a new approach that goes beyond wellness to true potential.
True potential occurs when individuals are exceling in every facet of their lives: physically, emotionally, socially, and financially. It occurs when an organization is experiencing higher performance, organizational trustworthiness and employee engagement.
Reaching true potential is marked by:
- Individuals who are thriving, contributing, connecting and learning.
- Lower healthcare costs and improved productivity.
- A culture built on trust where people do their best work.
True potential isn’t about managing someone’s health or changing behaviors. It’s about creating opportunities for individuals to live their best lives and do their best work. It’s about establishing a fresh perspective, shaping a trustworthy culture and nurturing healthy habits. This approach requires us to reevaluate everything we have come to accept with the status quo and to move beyond it.
Applying this new mindset starts with re-evaluating what success looks like. It requires us to specifically identify what we are trying to accomplish and how to meaningfully measure it.
Too often, vendors create their own metrics for demonstrating ROI, based on their specific strengths or self-generated formulas that don’t hold up to intense scrutiny. This has created a lot of noise and eroded the credibility of outcomes generated by traditional wellness programs. Measuring ROI has been a huge debate and an enormous distraction for decades. In the new model, we must set our sights on a meaningful method to measure progress toward true potential, one that can be an accurate and credible barometer of value.
Where do we find such a standard? Thanks to foundational research by the University of Michigan, which spans 40 years and 4 million healthcare claims, we have the answer. Through this research, the University identified 15 benchmark risks in physical, emotional, social and financial wellbeing that most directly impact healthcare costs and productivity.
This set of benchmark wellbeing risks is the gold standard when gauging the effectiveness of wellbeing strategies aimed at fueling true potential. These benchmark wellbeing risks are the set of factors that most directly affect the bottom line and the wellbeing of a population, the factors that make the difference between reaching true potential and falling short of it. By using this scientifically-valid standard to measure and evaluate your efforts, you can hold vendors and partners accountable for delivering and demonstrating results and have confidence that you are receiving a return on your investment of time and money. This is a necessary first step in taking a fresh approach to improving the wellbeing of your population.
Want to learn more about the roadmap for reaching true potential? Contact us today for a consultation and also receive a free whitepaper from our partner CHC Wellbeing. We can help you transform your wellness programs into wellbeing strategies that get results.
Why Pipe Freezing is a Problem
Water has a unique property in that it expands as it freezes. This expansion puts tremendous pressure on whatever is containing it, including metal or plastic pipes. No matter the strength of a container, expanding water can cause pipes to break.
Pipes that freeze most frequently are:
- Pipes that are exposed to severe cold, like outdoor hose bibs, swimming pool supply lines, and water sprinkler lines.
- Water supply pipes in unheated interior areas like basements and crawl spaces, attics, garages, or kitchen cabinets.
- Pipes that run against exterior walls that have little or no insulation.
How to Protect Pipes From Freezing
Before the onset of cold weather, protect your pipes from freezing by following these recommendations:
- Drain water from swimming pool and water sprinkler supply lines following manufacturer’s or installer’s directions. Do not put antifreeze in these lines unless directed. Antifreeze is environmentally harmful, and is dangerous to humans, pets, wildlife, and landscaping.
- Remove, drain, and store hoses used outdoors. Close inside valves supplying outdoor hose bibs. Open the outside hose bibs to allow water to drain. Keep the outside valve open so that any water remaining in the pipe can expand without causing the pipe to break.
- Add insulation to attics, basements and crawl spaces. Insulation will maintain higher temperatures in these areas.
- Check around the home for other areas where water supply lines are located in unheated areas. Look in the garage, and under kitchen and bathroom cabinets. Both hot and cold water pipes in these areas should be insulated.
- Consider installing specific products made to insulate water pipes like a “pipe sleeve” or installing UL-listed “heat tape,” “heat cable,” or similar materials on exposed water pipes. Newspaper can provide some degree of insulation and protection to exposed pipes – even ” of newspaper can provide significant protection in areas that usually do not have frequent or prolonged temperatures below freezing.
- Consider relocating the exposed pipes with the help of a plumbing repair company to provide increased protection from freezing.
How to Prevent Frozen Pipes
- Keep garage doors closed if there are water supply lines in the garage.
- Open kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors to allow warmer air to circulate around the plumbing. Be sure to move any harmful cleaners and household chemicals up out of the reach of children.
- When the weather is very cold outside, let the cold water drip from the faucet served by exposed pipes. Running water through the pipe – even at a trickle – helps prevent pipes from freezing.
- Keep the thermostat set to the same temperature both during the day and at night. By temporarily suspending the use of lower nighttime temperatures, you may incur a higher heating bill, but you can prevent a much more costly repair job if pipes freeze and burst.
- If you will be going away during cold weather, leave the heat on in your home, set to a temperature no lower than 55 F.
How to Thaw Frozen Pipes
If you turn on a faucet and only a trickle comes out, suspect a frozen pipe. Likely places for frozen pipes include against exterior walls or where your water service enters your home through the foundation.
- Keep the faucet open. As you treat the frozen pipe and the frozen area begins to melt, water will begin to flow through the frozen area. Running water through the pipe will help melt ice in the pipe.
- Apply heat to the section of pipe using an electric heating pad wrapped around the pipe, an electric hair dryer, a portable space heater (kept away from flammable materials), or by wrapping pipes with towels soaked in hot water. Do not use a blowtorch, kerosene or propane heater, charcoal stove, or other open flame device.
- Apply heat until full water pressure is restored. If you are unable to locate the frozen area, if the frozen area is not accessible, or if you can not thaw the pipe, call a licensed plumber.
Check all other faucets in your home to find out if you have additional frozen pipes. If one pipe freezes, others may freeze, too.
Why Risk Transfer?
Presented by Christopher F. Hawthorne, CPCU, CIC
Insurance premiums fluctuate annually due to sales and payroll activity of a contractor and also due to loss history. The insurance policy provides money to rebuild damaged property, to defend in a liability suit, to pay settlements as well as take care of employees when they are injured on the job. These combined costs are labeled as losses.
An insurance loss has the potential of driving insurance premiums up for four or five years as well as limiting which carriers will wish to work with a contractor. When an insurance carrier is determining what it will offer in term of premiums, it will incorporate the prior four years of losses as part of the pricing mechanism. The fewer and smaller the losses, the more carriers will be interested and the carriers can justify offering lower premiums.
An available risk management technique to lower the size of a contractors losses arising from working with a sub-contractor is Risk Transfer. Risk Transfer can protect one party’s insurance program and future premiums by transferring the cost of a loss to another party. Conversely, it can increase the future costs of the other party’s insurance program.
The major types of protection in risk transfer agreements are as follows:
Hold Harmless-Party A holds Party B harmless for a loss when Party A has caused part or all of a loss.
Indemnify– Party A agrees to reimburse Party B for damages (settlements and judgments).
Defend– Party A agrees to pay the cost to defend Party B after a loss if Party B is named in a claim or suit.
Additional Insured Status– Party A provides coverage for Party B under Party A’s insurance program for Operations and Completed Operations.
Primary Coverage-Party A states that it’s coverage is primary should Party B be brought into the suit.
Non-Contributory– Coverage-Party A states it’s policy disallows Party B’s policies from sharing in the loss.
Waiver of Subrogation-Party A disallows its insurance company from pursuing Party B’s insurance carrier for any amount due to Party B’s negligence that may have contributed to the loss.
In short Party A is highly protected by Party B.
When is it appropriate for one to agree to these terms? While this question is to be answered on a case by case basis, in general if accepting work from a General Contractor (GC), it is the norm that the GC will expect the terms to be agreed to, to some degree. The economic value of the relationship should be considered before agreeing to adding this exposure to one’s liability.
When is it appropriate to ask for these terms? Whenever possible, as it greatly enhances the protection for an operation.
Not all agreements are the same and not all insurance policies can back them up. It is critical both parties involve their attorneys as well as their agents before signing. As always, a team approach and communication will put everyone is a better position to succeed and survive a loss.