Grow and manage your business
Once your business is up and running, you may want to learn more about how your insurance premiums are calculated. This page also provides an overview of your health and safety responsibilities, what to do if your employee gets injured or ill on the job, and how you can support them after an injury or illness.
- Workplace health and safety
- If your employee is injured
- Your insurance
- Resources
Workplace health and safety
As a small business owner, you share the same responsibilities that all employers do to keep your workplace healthy and safe. You need to have an effective health and safety program in place. The type of program you need depends on:
- How many employees you have
- The level of risk in your workplace
Our health and safety pages have information and resources to support you. Learn more about these and other key health and safety responsibilities:
- Setting up a health and safety program
- Training and orienting workers
- Identifying hazards and managing risks
- Providing workplace first aid
- Conducting regular workplace inspections
- Providing effective supervision
You can also call our Prevention Information Line if you have questions about health and safety: 604.276.3100, or 1.888.621.7233 toll-free.
Access industry health and safety resources
Find industry resources to improve your business’s health and safety performance. You can also use our free industry data and tools to see trends in work-related injuries, claims costs, assessment rates, and prevention activities.
If your employee is injured
When to report an injury or illness
If a person working for you has a work-related injury or disease and gets medical treatment, as the employer you must report the incident to us. We need to hear from you as soon as possible.
Contact us if you or your employee:
- Sustains a physical injury (even if no time from work is missed)
- Receives a diagnosis of a work-related disease
- Has a mental health injury related to work or the work environment
- Has hearing loss due to prolonged exposure or a specific incident
- Suffers broken eyeglasses, dentures, hearing aid, or artificial limb due to a work-related incident
The fastest way to report is to use our online tool. See How employers report a workplace injury or disease.
You also need to report serious incidents or fatalities immediately by calling our Prevention Information Line. This is in addition to reporting an injury related to a claim.
Supporting an injured employee
When your employee is injured, you both have a legal duty to cooperate with each other and with WorkSafeBC in the employee’s safe and timely return to work.
Working together with your injured employee to remain at work or return to work while they recover is good for them and good for your business. To learn about your responsibilities after a workplace injury and how you can keep an injured employee connected to the workplace while they recover, see Employers: Return-to-work information.
Need help?
If you need help with a claim, you can call our Claims Call Centre.
For more information or help with return-to-work best practices, you can contact our Return to Work Services.
Your insurance
Understand your insurance premiums: How are they determined?
Your premiums are based on three factors: the base rate for your industry, your payroll, and how healthy and safe your business is.
Your business is grouped with other businesses that do similar work. By grouping businesses together, we can set fair and accurate insurance premiums that match the type of work you do.
Find out more about how we set insurance premiums.
For example, let’s say you run a small restaurant. You would likely be grouped with other restaurants into classification unit 761035, which is named “Restaurants and other dining establishments.” This grouping of similar businesses is then assigned a rate group.
We set the premiums for every rate group by adding up the group’s total claims cost and then dividing that by the group’s payroll.
How do rate groups affect you?
- The base rate applies to all businesses in a rate group.
- Employers in a rate group share the cost of injuries, illnesses, and prevention.
- Rates can change each year.
Learn more about these terms:
When you register for WorkSafeBC insurance, you’ll be provided with a CU for you to choose from based on the products you make, services you provide, and the work you do, including tools, materials, or processes.
Visit Find your classification unit, industry, or rate to search for your classification unit.
Some CUs are small, so we group similar businesses together into an industry group (for example, berry farms, apiaries, vineyards and wineries). Larger CUs form their own industry group.
We group industry groups into rate groups. Some industry groups are large enough to be their own rate group, and smaller groups are combined with others that have similar claim costs (these groups may include different types of businesses, but they share similar claim costs). This helps us set more stable rates.
Each year, we review these groups and move any industry group that no longer fits its rate group for two or more consecutive years. Industry groups can move up into higher risk rate groups or they can move down into lower risk rate groups, depending on their health and safety and return to work performance. This helps us to keep rates stable, fair, and ensures that there’s adequate funding to cover current claims and future costs.
The rate applied to all employers in a rate group starts by calculating total claims costs ÷ total payroll. We also consider WorkSafeBC’s investment returns and the cost to run our prevention, compensation programs, and services delivery mandates.
Learn about upcoming rate changes
You can join one of our free annual rate information sessions — in person or online — to learn about the upcoming preliminary rates. We’ll explain what affects your premiums, any updates to rate groups and industry groups, and how strong health and safety practices and return to work can help lower your costs.
See information on annual rate information sessions.
Resources
Creating and Managing a Healthy and Safe Workplace
This book is an updated version of How to Implement a Formal Health and Safety Program. It has been revised to be a comprehensive primer on basic health and safety planning and management for...
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Managing a Safe Return to Work
This guide provides tips and templates to help employers put a seamless process in place for handling workplace injuries and helping employees get back to work safely.
Visit Employers:...