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Vice President, Risk Services
The Cheesecake Factory

Risk Manager Walks the Walk

Instead of ordering a new claims-allocation system, Kurt Leisure taught his managers to think about claims, and instill in them that safety and claims can be controlled.

Kurt Leisure has been in the restaurant business for 25 years, the last 12 at The Cheesecake Factory, where he is vice president, risk services. If you ask him for evidence of his success, he's liable to talk to you about shoes.

To be specific, the company's slip-resistant shoe program is part of a unique claims-allocation program developed and implemented by Leisure. It has led to a 78 percent drop in the cost of risk over a seven-year period. Other elements of the program include a nurse triage program, highly customized safety training, and reporting claims within 24 hours.

Most significantly, Leisure has involved employees at every level in learning about and adopting the program, and creating a system of rewards for participation. The success of this program was significant for Leisure: "That's telling me that we found a good solution and we have buy-off from everyone from the dishwasher up to the management."

Leisure also has supporters throughout the restaurant industry, including Patrick Sterling, director of risk and administration at Texas Roadhouse. Sterling met Leisure through his involvement in industry groups. "I quickly realized he's a leader. You could tell the way folks respect him. I thought, 'I gotta get to know this guy'; I sought him out," Sterling said. Leisure has become a mentor to him, generous with guidance and advice, and his claims-allocation program has been a model for Sterling's own.

Sterling admires Leisure's grasp of how the industry works. "He understands the business very well and knows how to get programs in place. Restaurant operators are very entrepreneurial. Part of being a smart and successful risk manager is knowing your culture. You can't necessarily flip a switch--sometimes it takes two to three years to change culture. Kurt gets that very well."

Leisure has taken a step-by-step approach to implementing new safety programs, making sure to have companywide support. "Risk management was new to when I came into the organization twelve years ago. Some risk managers take a machine gun approach,'' he said. "I'd be a complete failure if I didn't have buy-off in my operations teams in the programs I push down to them. I'm careful what I do push down and I make sure it works. Our program is complicated and has a lot of moving pieces. Most off-the-shelf things don't work in our operations."

Leisure's long-term goal was to instill a new mindset that safety and claims are not just a cost of business, and that claims can be prevented and costs controlled. Rather than jumping in with a new claims-allocation system, he started by teaching a new way to think about claims. "First here's how to prevent claims from happening. Next, here's how to mitigate when it happens. I set them up for success," he said.

Leisure stresses what's distinct about The Cheesecake Factory. "If you look at the culture of our restaurant, our differentiator is service. You expect something and we deliver way over and beyond,'' he said. "If you drop a fork, we present you with a new one on a silver platter and you think, 'Wow, Is this the Ritz Carlton?' '' The emphasis on excellent service was applied to the claims process.

A key element of Leisure's innovative approach and of his success is a keen understanding of human psychology. "This approach is measuring people's emotions," he said. Leisure wanted to make sure that, when injuries did occur, injured employees were attended to. "I was thinking there's a good percentage of our staff who are injured and we're thinking they'll be fine but no one is checking on them, and they're home thinking someone will reach out to them. If we didn't interact, they might run to an attorney.

"It's building a bridge to make sure the staff member is OK, and we know how the accident happened so we can prevent future ones,'' he said. "We're pulling in all the people who matter: manager, claims adjuster, medical person. A lot of people have not had a positive experience with a claims experience--they think they're going to be a claim number." Instead, they now get personalized attention. "As a result, we have virtually no litigation against us," he said.

With such dramatic results, what's next? "The low hanging fruit is gone," Leisure said. "I'm really focused on training. That's where we can take it to next level."

His future plans include looking at "every piece of business," from purchasing to cyber risk, as well as training and the use of technology. All in all, this is a man who is proud of his successes, but not resting on his laurels. "I'm very passionate about what I do,'' he said. "I've been doing it a long time, and I still get excited every morning trying to figure out what I'm going to do next."

-- Lynn Rosen

Turning up the Heat

For Kurt Leisure, vice president, risk services, for The Cheesecake Factory Inc., the expression "cost of doing business'' is a loaded term, a safety and prevention euphemism if not for complacency, then for not doing nearly enough.

Leisure's favorite ingredient for the cost of doing business is one called "Zero.'' Every claim, he said, can be prevented, every workers' comp cost controlled as carefully as oven temperatures.

Despite his employer's safety and prevention programs on paper, operations managers need to adhere to them.

Leisure's never above infusing a little competition and financial incentive to ensure that operations professionals are driven to adhere to his claims-allocation program.

The restaurant chain's loss rate has dropped from $4.13 per $100 of payroll to $1.41 per $100 of payroll, since he implemented his claims- allocation program.

Leisure is a Responsibility Leader® because he displayed the initiative to take a hard look at a program that other companies might have considered state of the art, and he had the courage to change it.

Manager, Decision Support and Analytics, Global Risk Management Division
ARAMARK Corp.

A Big Thinker with Intellect to Spare

For John Toczek, the statistics are the easy part. Turning the data into digestible, presentable information for clients is where the innovation lies.

John Toczek manages the five-person decision support and analytics team, part of the global risk management division at ARAMARK Corp. It's a small team but it has companywide impact.

"Our goal is to enable other departments to make data-driven decisions," he said.

Although Toczek brings a statistics background to his job, he realizes that one stumbling block is the discomfort many people have with data. "In general, people don't like to look at a lot of data," he said. "They want something they can interact with."

This understanding, that the crucial information provided by the data needs to be conveyed in a more interactive and easy-to-grasp manner, led to the development of Interactive Risk Simulators (IRS).

The simulators are tools that visually portray statistical relationships between business metrics like employee tenure, employee engagement, a trained workforce and account tenure, and risk management metrics such as Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) incident rates, workers' compensation rates and customer injuries.

The simulators use gauges and interactive sliders to answer questions such as how more employee engagement tends to lower the OSHA incident rates. "Once you understand the links, you can control your risk better because you know which actions are going to be most effective at mitigating that risk," he said.

Toczek said the risk simulators meet the challenge of making complicated material accessible for a lay audience.

The work that led to the creation of the simulators began a few years ago during a discussion with Andrew Pelcin, director of decision support for global risk management, about the relationship between actions taken by front-line managers, food-service directors, district managers, and general managers in the field, and the effect of their decisions on ARAMARK's risk metrics.

"There's a lot of collaboration where we'll sit in front of the whiteboard and say 'What could we do with this information we have, and how do we deliver it to the people who are going to consume it?' " Pelcin said.

Pelcin said Toczek excels at translating complicated statistical information into easy-to-understand material. "He's phenomenal at delivering this information. It's one thing to make a statistical model, but the challenge is making it so the information can be consumed by anyone at any level almost without an explanation. You can't have an innovative solution if it can't get accepted as well."

Ken Bowman, vice president of safety risk and control at ARAMARK, raves about Toczek's abilities. "He's one of the smartest people I ever worked with. He's really interested in the next big challenge, in figuring out what the business problem is,'' Bowman said "He really likes to have things to think about and to solve problems. He is extremely customer focused and a good listener. He's resonated very much with our field population and been able to really use their feedback to enhance tools they've developed."

Development of the risk simulator progressed slowly at first.

The decision support team also works with other departments within the company, including claims, safety and risk control, and quality assurance. Those are its primary internal clients, and they support the needs of the field and other departments within ARAMARK.

Work on the risk simulator project continued during spare time, in a company atmosphere where innovation was encouraged. "Leadership here understands the value in innovation, so they make sure the employees have time to create those kinds of things," Toczek said.

Once the risk simulator was ready for testing, it went to what Toczek describes as "200 beta-testers we keep on hand to try things out.'' The product went out across the organization, up to regional vice presidents and down to front-line managers for feedback, Bowman said. The product was then tweaked and finally unveiled.

The risk simulator is available to all the lines of business, but not to every individual. Rollout continues, and preliminary feedback is positive, Pelcin said.

Pelcin praised Toczek's accomplishment: "It's that simple solution that you explain to someone and they say 'Why didn't we think of that five years ago?' When I slide the part-time employee ratio and they see that this affects your OSHA rate and how, they get it.

"Everyone understands how risk management plays into the greater organization and how their business directions are going to affect the larger mix. The fact it's visual really helps people understand.

"There are probably a million people in the world who could do the statistics, but to figure out a way to display it so simply and yet get all the points across, that's the beauty of this," Pelcin said.

-- By Lynn Rosen

Communicating Through the Statistics

ARAMARK was faced with the challenge of determining the statistical relationship between business metrics, employee tenure, employee engagement, and risk metrics such as workers' compensation injury rate and rate of customer injuries.

What John Toczek came up with was Interactive Risk Simulators, a system that would allow managers to make theoretical adjustments in business metrics and watch how those changes would affect risk metrics. ARAMARK's global risk management team surveyed more than 200 of the company's managers on the new system.

This ability to communicate and execute complex risk concepts to a wider audience, including line managers, food service directors, district managers and general managers, has helped to bridge the risk communication gap in ARAMARK's various departments.

Toczek is a Responsibility Leader® because the accessibility and the simplicity of his innovation will allow it to be duplicated in other companies and industries.

As Toczek's process is duplicated and/or licensed, workers with other companies will be much more comfortable in assessing the connection between risk management and the business processes. This should result in safer workplaces and greater efficiency.