2026 Theo Award Winner: Fox Corporation : Risk & Insurance

Stephanie Evans-Zalma joined Fox Corporation’s Risk Management team in January 2024. Within her first year, she was focused on something that might seem unglamorous but turned out to be foundational: relationships.

Table of Contents

“When I started at FOX, there was an opportunity to improve on how the workers’ comp department was servicing its internal and external stakeholders,” she says. “I focused on building relationships, understanding other groups’ pain points, and opening honest dialogue with our TPA, EHS, HR, and Legal teams. My goal was for workers’ comp to be seen as an extension of those groups — not a roadblock.”

That relational groundwork paid off quickly. Claim reporting lag times fell substantially. Litigation rates dropped. And the operational confidence those improvements generated set the stage for something more ambitious.

A Question That Changed Everything

About a year into her tenure, Evans-Zalma’s role shifted — from Risk Management into the Benefits team, an unusual home for workers’ compensation but one that, at FOX, reflected a deliberate philosophy: that an injured employee’s experience is fundamentally a benefits question, not just a compliance one.

The move surfaced a challenge that was hiding in plain sight.

Stephanie Evans-Zalma, Risk Management & Work Comp, Fox Corporation

FOX’s workforce includes journalists, photographers, producers, editors, on-air talent, and other professionals whose salaries often far exceed state-regulated workers’ compensation temporary total disability caps. Under the standard statutory structure, an injured employee earning well above the cap would see a significant drop in income during recovery — while a colleague with the same injury, absent from work for a non-work-related reason, would receive full salary continuation through short-term disability.

“The question became: why should a full-time employee receive better benefits on short-term disability than on workers’ compensation?” Evans-Zalma says. “Given how helpful and loyal FOX is to its employees, the Benefits team wanted to ensure they had the same level of financial security regardless of how the injury occurred.”

The answer was a Workers’ Compensation Salary Continuation Program, effective July 1, 2025 — providing eligible full-time employees with 100% salary continuation for up to six months per accepted workers’ compensation claim within a 52-week period.

Building It From the Ground Up

The implementation required careful choreography across a large, complex organization.

FOX operates across multiple states, each with its own workers’ compensation regulations and nuances. Multiple HR teams throughout the country weighed in. Finance and Benefits needed to ensure seamless integration with existing short-term and long-term disability programs. CorVel, FOX’s TPA, needed to develop specialized salary continuation codes and coordinate their claims teams around the new structure. And AIG and Marsh both played roles in the carrier approval process.

Evans-Zalma explored alternatives — including a “top-up” model that would have supplemented statutory workers’ comp payments to bridge the income gap — but the complexity of executing that consistently across a national footprint made it impractical. The salary continuation structure, modeled on FOX’s existing short-term disability benefit, was cleaner and more equitable.

“The biggest challenge was the sheer number of stakeholders involved, combined with our national footprint,” she says. “But we tackled it step by step, and within a few short months, everything came together.”

She’s also quick to share the credit. “I can’t take full credit for the idea — Kevin Lord, Ted Exarhakos, and Liza Rosen were instrumental to getting this started. I feel lucky to have been part of a team that was so supportive and committed to making it happen.”

The Relief You Can Hear

The operational results since the program launched have been meaningful. Claim reporting lag times have dropped substantially. Litigation has decreased. Bill review savings have been significant. Case management outcomes have strengthened.

But the outcome Evans-Zalma returns to — the one that matters most to her — has nothing to do with metrics.

“The biggest improvement has been in how we communicate benefits to injured employees,” she says. “Being injured, navigating the workers’ comp process, and worrying about lost income can be incredibly stressful. Now, I can tell employees that their only focus should be on getting better — and that their paycheck will continue as usual, through FOX, at full pay, with all their regular benefit deductions in place.”

She pauses on what that moment sounds like.

“The relief you can hear in their voices is honestly the most meaningful outcome,” she says.

“FOX has consistently challenged traditional approaches and implemented meaningful changes, including a salary continuation program that directly supports employees during recovery,” says Jason Wheeler, CorVel Vice President of National Sales & Account Management.

“What sets the organization apart is its ability to balance operational discipline with innovation, creating a program that delivers consistent outcomes while prioritizing the employee experience. CorVel is proud to partner in these efforts, working closely to enhance claims performance and support a high-performing program that continues to raise the standard for workers’ compensation management.”

For FOX’s workforce — people who became reporters and photographers and editors because it was a dream, not just a job — the program carries a meaning that goes beyond financial protection. Many of them earn more than the maximum statutory lost-time rate. Without salary continuation, a serious injury could mean months of meaningful income loss at precisely the moment when their only job should be to recover.

“For a lot of them, this isn’t just a job — it is a dream come true to be able to work as reporters, photographers, or editors,” Evans-Zalma says. “They want to get back to what they love. This program helps ease that burden.”

FOX’s workers’ compensation program, once viewed primarily through a compliance lens, has been quietly repositioned as an expression of the company’s values — a place where what’s right for injured employees and what’s right for the organization are, by design, the same thing.

It started with relationships. It grew into infrastructure. And it landed on a simple promise: when you’re hurt, your only job is to heal.

The Theo Award celebrates its sophomore year, honoring 28 workers’ compensation programs for their excellence and service to workers across the nation. To learn more about the award and amazing qualities each winner possesses, visit here.