When injured employees returned to work, Frank Barnett found doctors wouldn’t specify what kinds of light duty were OK. Then he figured out a better way to communicate with them (part of an ongoing series).
As part of an ongoing series, we’ll have practicing HR managers present real problems they faced and how they solved them.
When injured employees came back to work in light-duty jobs, trying to get good guidance from doctors was frustrating.
Usually, the injured worker came in holding a doctor’s note saying nothing more than the fact that the worker should be assigned “modified duty.” What the heck did that mean?
We were stuck trying to figure out how to assign the worker to a job that wasn’t too strenuous – or too easy. When we discussed the problem with managers, we realized it wasn’t all the doctors’ fault. How were they supposed to know the physical requirements of each job?
Go by the book
Our answer: Tell them, in the form of a pamphlet that describes the requirements of each job. The pamphlet’s nothing fancy – just a straightforward description of the physical requirements of each job category in our company.
It’s something doctors can use as a basis to describe their definition of modified duty.
The pamphlet produced two great results:
• Doctors now give us better details on how to structure modified-duty jobs, and
• Our managers don’t have to guess about assigning duties that might cause a re-injury to the light-duty worker.
(Frank Barnett, director, Anderson Lithographic Co., Commerce, CA)
