13724 Venetian Court, Orland Park, Illinois 60467Office 708-301-6425 Fax: 708-301-6455
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Providing Human Resources Consulting for Small to Mid-Size Organizations | |
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Greetings!
This month's newsletter contains a mix of articles which are intended to highlight the importance of assessing your organization for legal compliance and personnel effeciency. RGL Consultants would welcome the opportunity to assist you in evaluating your compliance efforts and provide support to your managment team to review your competitive standing in personnel development and employee relations against "Best Practices." |
 Planning Ahead
2010 is anticipated by many to be a year of business climate improvement. If you concur with that thinking, now would be an excellent time and a perfect opportunity to review and up-date your employee relations plans, programs and strategies to ensure you remain competitive in the marketplace and thereby increase your prospects for retaining your existing workforce and attracting quality candidates to your team.
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As an employer offering health insurance to your employees, including Flexible Spending Account benefits (generally considered a self-funded group health plan), your organization is considered a "covered entity" under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) privacy and security rules.
Until now, many of you have simply had to segregate your medical-related information from Personnel Files, heighten sensitivity to maintaining privacy of employee health information, and (hopefully) train supervisors and managers in compliance with these requirements. Recent changes, many effective in February, 2010, require a renewed focus on HIPAA privacy and security compliance. These changes would necessitate affirmative disclosure to affected individuals, the government and, in some cases, prominent media outlets of many breaches of HIPAA-protected information.
In addition, penalties for a breach of HIPAA privacy and security rules have been increased significantly (with federal government enforcement becoming a higher priority). Finally, Health Plan sponsors can now be directly sued by a state attorney general for HIPAA violations. The law that is responsible for many of these changes is contained in the Health Information Technology For Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH).
Required Actions by health plan sponsors:
- Identify and appoint a Privacy Official responsible for coordination and compliance with the law.
- Review and ensure up-dated business associate agreements are in place for all vendors having access to your employees' protected health information.
- Review procedures for "securing" protected health information to prevent breaches and establish procedures in advance to identify and evaluate breaches and provide required notifications if necessary.
- Review existing administrative, technical and physical safeguards and implement additional safeguards as necessary.
- Review and up-date the plan's administrative practices and all privacy and security policies and procedures to address the expanded rules, especially the breach notification requirements and the prohibition on the use of genetic information for underwriting purposes.
- Up-date the plan's privacy notice to incorporate GINA (Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008) and appropriate HITECH changes.
- Train the plan's workforce members. Note, training is specifically required by the law. Training must include information on the policies and procedures that implement the breach of notification rules. Employees must be reminded about previous HIPAA privacy and security rules and the new changes as well as the steps you as the Plan Sponsor are taking to further secure protected health information. Employees must be apprised that sanctions will be imposed for any failure to comply with these policies and procedures, that employees are permited to file complaints regarding a failure to comply with these policies and procedures, and that the Plan Sponsor will refrain from intimidating or retaliatory acts against complainants and those exercising their HIPAA rights.
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Coaching: The Edge in Making a Difference in Your Organization
The success of an organization can be directly attributed to the quality of its employees. This success does not happen by accident nor does it occur without the right ingredients. Developing quality employees relies on a combination of natural talents, motivation to succeed, knowledge, vision, direction and most importantly, proper coaching.
To be clear, coaching is not mentoring and mentoring is not coaching. However, times exist where the two approaches overlap or are used in conjunction with one another.
The definitions reflect the differences. Coaching is the activity of developing an employee's skill sets through guided activities and discussion; generally tasked-based and performance driven. Mentoring on the other hand, provides assistance in personal and career development and is often a longer term relationship between the mentor and protégé.
Why Should You Coach?
- Overcome poor performance
- Teach new skills
- Enhance productivity
- Increase promotability
- Retain employees
- Boost morale and job satisfaction
- Increase motivation
Identify the Coaching Opportunities
Managers and supervisors should always be seeking opportunities to provide coaching and support to their subordinates. Here are a few situations where coaching would be appropriate:
- The employee consistently submits written work that is full of grammatical and spelling errors.
- A subordinate refuses to collaborate with other employees.
- An employee dominates group activities to the point where other workers avoid the employee.
- An employee harbors extreme fear of speaking up in meetings.
- A supervisor is too casual/extreme in his dealings with his subordinates.
- An employee cannot get along with co-workers and disrupts others working around him/her.
- An employee who is habitually late.
There are many options and styles available to managers and supervisors when a coaching approach is chosen for subordinates or employees. It is extremely important to remember when engaging in a coaching opportunity that your approach is focused on specific behaviors, their causes and seeking the desired behavioral response.
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Regards,
Rich
Rich Lehr, President
RGL Consultants | |
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