Business screen magazine (1940)

(Above) Scenes from "Mind Over Motor" typical Zurich safety subject. J^USINESS can succeed and endure only as a public service. The American System cannot survive if it is built solely on the foundation of private profit, solely on the basis of financial return to stockholders and management. Realizing that every business that benefits from the American way of life must accept its share of responsibility for preserving this system. Zurich — more than three years ago — assigned one executive to devote his entire time to finding the answer to one question: "How can Zurich improve its service to the American Public and to American Business?" The answer, still in the process of development and expansion, was found in Zurich's "Safety Zone Insurance Service," in which slide films play an important role. Films are. in fact, the keystone of an arch of public service in which every practical means of employee education has its part. It was obvious from the first THE INSURANCE AGENT TURNS aUoLIv mLKVaIiI a new philosophy in safety education gives double service to employer and employee mmtmmmBmmmaam that Zurich, as a casualty insurance company, could serve employers, employees, and the public alike by devoting its resources to helping reduce the tremendous toll of life, money and time taken by avoidable accidents. Insurance men know that only two percent of all industrial "accidents" are un-preventable. Ten percent of the accidents result from unsafe equipment, lack of proper safeguards which management might undertake to protect employees. Employers, safety associations, and the safety engineering departments of great casualty insurance companies are doing an excellent job of eliminaitng these so-called "management hazards". Businessmen almost always overlook, however, the fact that fully 88 percent of all accidents are caused by employees themselves, have their origin in a faulty mental condition or in the lack of proper supervision or education. Workmen's compensation, paid by an insurance company, can never equal full pay. No settlement check can ever compensate fully for loss of life, for pain, or for mental distress to an employee's family. Today it is especially obvious that payment of indemnity, as provided in an insurance policy, can never replace the precious "man hours" lost to national defense by accidents, mistakes, and mmmmfmmmmm'im' spoilage that hinders the maximum utilization of industry's tools and other resources. It is in the reduction of these unnecessary accidents — the 88 percent caused by improper mental attitudes or carelessness on the part of the individual employees, at work or away — that Zurich has found its unique opportunity for public service through the creation of Safety Zone Insurance Service. This service is a completely integrated program of safety education and industrial relations, offered free to Zurich clients, through its agents and producers, which stimulates individual employees to train for lives of greater individual success. The program is based on the known fact that what a man does at work is a by-product of l# what he does away from the job. It recognizes that a worker is four limes more liable to be disabled away from work than on the job. Therefore it is based entirely on the worker's own self-interest, his social (or gregarious) instinct, his natural desire to feel important and to accept responsibility when it is offered him. It has been developed, is still being improved, with the cooperation of a group of outstanding authorities on the various problems of human behavior and opinion building that were faced in the solution of the basic objective, accident prevention. The success of their work is seen in these cases, selected at random from Zurich's files: — One company had developed a 155 percent loss experience on Mr. Neville Pilling Field reports indicated unusual audience interest and response to the new "Safety Zone Insurance Service" slide films produced by MacDonald Productions, Chicago, for the Zurich General Accident and Liability Insurance Company, Ltd. So Business Screen interviewed alert, young, far-seeing Neville Pilling, United States manager of Zurich. The resulting story discloses that Zurich's successful slide films are based on a public relations philosophy of unusual depth. The Editor. AUDIENCES FROM EVERY WALK OF LIFE attend meetings — (below) employees of a San Antonio drug chain. An Auburn (New York) packing house group listens and learns at a Safety Zone Insurance Service safety session. Retail grocery chain employees attend another r! educational group showing arranged by a Zurich S'l 24 BusinrsH Svreen