• New taxes affecting employers: Medicare increases, excise and uninsured taxes
• New definitions: "large" and "small" employers, "full-time" and "full-time equivalent"
• Individual mandates: Penalties and exemptions
• Employer cost impact: coverage options
• Mini-med plans: history and future status
• Health care reform: commentary from a carrier's perspective

Background checks are becoming a staple of our industry. In December, SI Review reported that 60% of the companies that responded to their survey always conduct criminal background checks. (Another 38% conduct them sometimes.)

These checks are a great selling point for clients: they indicate that you provide high-quality candidates, that you value the safety of your clients' current workers and that you also value your clients' businesses in terms of risk and legal liability. 

Now that the nightmare of year-end stress is done, it's time to take a breath, relax, ... and think about the effects of stress on your employees. The situational types of stress come up during crunch times (like, say, January) and make you want to tear your hair out, but the more subtle long-term chronic stress can cause some real damage, not just to your employees' health, but to your company's finances as well.

In last year's Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, researchers Tom Rath and Dr. James K. Harter discovered that worker happiness and engagement can have a major financial impact. Among the least happy and least engaged employees, the annual per-person cost of lost productivity due to sick days is upward of $28,000, while the sick-day lost-productivity cost among the happiest and most engaged workers is only $840 a year.

If you'd like to save tens of thousands of dollars per year per employee by reducing stress, you can start by increasing two primary aspects of employee engagement: a sense of control over their work and careers, and a sense of appreciation and fun.

One of the most meaningful ways to engage your clients is through spending time with them, like in a romantic relationship. And the same rules of selflessness apply here as they do to romance: when you're spending time with a client, don't use that time to sell them. Instead ask how their business is doing, how they're doing as people, what challenges they're facing, what they've accomplished recently. Be sure to listen to them (and record your notes from the meeting into COATS).

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We'd like to know how you'd feel about joining a COATS Users Group on LinkedIn. This group would focus on discussions of how to get the most out of COATS, with input from COATS staff members and other users like you.  

To vote on whether or not you'd be interested in such a group, click here. (Note: if you took this survey back in December, please take it again; the link has been corrected.)