Our company feels like a family, even though we operate four warehouses across the county. I am the entire human resources department for our company. It makes for short departmental meetings! When they come to see me, our employees don’t just pick up paychecks and fill out forms in our office; they stop and tell me and the others in the office about their lives, showing us pictures of their kids while grabbing a cookie or muffin someone inevitably made that week. We keep in touch with them by email too.  Having more than one employee injured means keeping up with doctor visits and legal deadlines in addition to our regular safety meetings. Can I remember it all? Of course, if you include sitting straight up at 3 a.m. in the middle of the night realizing I forgot to send notes to our attorney on a doctor visit the day before.

"Don’t ask about that one time I scheduled a safety meeting for the same day as an important deposition of the shift supervisor, I still cringe about it."

At first I figured keeping up with the deadlines would be an easy task since we had just a handful of worker’s compensation claims. But I soon realized that there were so many deadlines for each case, that I had to find some system to use. I tried calendaring systems of all kinds on the market, but I ended up spending so much time setting up the calendars and reminders that I had less time to spend with the employees. I juggle multiple tasks throughout the day, and entering deadlines ended up being a low priority. And those muffins? Well, I ended up stress eating more than my fair share of them.  We didn’t have the budget for a calendar system AND a task manager system.

I needed something that could capture notes about doctor visits, meetings, calculate lost work, and remind me of deadlines. And importantly, I needed it to be easy to use so that I didn’t lose time entering and checking calendars instead of working with employees on their other concerns. And if I couldn’t remember deadlines, how was I going to remind others about needing their notes, getting documents copied for attorney deadlines or preparing officers of the company for depositions or other court activities?

Modwatch’s calendar function puts all the details on workers’ compensation in one place.

And I can remind everyone who needs to know about it easily. Now I can keep the attorney, adjuster and the operations director in the loop on all relevant dates.  I can even remind different warehouses about safety meetings in different locations through one system.  Keeping my notes on the meetings is easy too. I can easily see activities coming up in all my cases in one place. I no longer make the mistake of scheduling safety meetings for days when we need to make our shift supervisors available for depositions. And I love that I can email calendar information to key supervisors and officers.