Written by: Robin Currie
Last week Liberty Mutual released the 2026 Workplace Safety Index. I want to walk you through what it says, because it points at a cost center most of our clients are not managing.
The index ranks the causes of workplace injuries serious enough to keep someone out more than five days, measured by workers compensation cost. Overexertion involving outside sources came in first at $13.07 billion annually. Falls on the same level came second at $9.92 billion. Being struck by an object or equipment came third at $6.21 billion. The top five causes together account for $38.26 billion.Overexertion has been the number one cause in every index for twenty five years, driven largely by manual material handling.
Read that list again and notice what it is not. It is not a list of equipment failures. Overexertion is a mismatch between what a technician’s body can tolerate and what the job asks of it. Falls on the same level come down to balance, ankle and hip control, and how fast someone can react when a foot lands wrong. These are not hazards you fix with signage.
They are physical capacity problems. And physical capacity is the one variable in your service department that nobody is managing.
Why this lands on your EMR
Injuries produce claims. Claims produce your Experience Modification Rate. Your EMR sets your workers compensation premium, and it decides which commercial contracts you can bid on at all. Most dealer principals I work with feel the second one harder than the first.
The downstream costs compound quietly. The National Safety Council puts the average medically consulted workplace injury at roughly $43,000 once you add medical bills, lost wages, lost productivity, and administrative overhead. That figure does not include the specialist referrals, the prescriptions, or the months a technician spends working at seventy percent before anyone files anything.
One prevented injury pays for a year of prevention.
What we are adding
I am introducing a new addition to the Currie curriculum: the Currie Wellness Program, delivered through Project Human, a Currie company.
It is run by Marco Sanchez, who is my son. Marco has spent nearly twenty years in strength and conditioning, including time in the National Hockey League, and he is a licensed manual therapist. He has spent his career keeping people who load their bodies for a living able to keep doing it.
The program treats wellness as the whole picture. Strength and movement, yes, but also nutrition, sleep and daily habits, and the mobility work that keeps a technician able to get into the positions the job demands.
It starts by assessing the company, not the individual. We look at your EMR, your days lost to illness and injury, insurance costs, and how things break down by department. Almost every organization has low hanging fruit, and it is rarely where leadership expects. Sometimes it is sleep. Sometimes it is that nobody moves for nine hours. Sometimes it is stress that shows up as an injury six months later. We find out which before anyone is handed a program.
Most corporate wellness programs are static. A company buys one, receives a set of templated PDFs, and nobody opens them again. Ours is built for your company and then rebuilt for each person in it. The plan for a fifty five year old in HR should not look anything like the plan for a twenty six year old technician on the floor, and in most programs it does.
Delivery runs through a proprietary operating system built by Currie. Every employee carries it on their phone: their exercise program, their nutrition guidance, their mobility work, and their progress over time. The engagement includes monthly appointments, in person or virtual, and quarterly leadership check ins to review how the program is tracking.
There is a second effect worth naming. A workplace wellness program is one of the few initiatives people do together. Technicians who train alongside each other look out for each other on the floor. That is not a line item, but every dealer principal who has run one will tell you it changed the room.
If this is worth a conversation:
Reply to this email, or book fifteen minutes directly with Marco.
You can also reach him at: Marco@curriemanagement.com or 781-572-9298.
My father founded this firm in 1973 on the idea that the health of a dealership comes down to the people running it. And raising a son who is a high-performing athlete has reinforced Currie’s thinking on this.