Human Resources – Page 2 – Risk Management 365

Embrace 4 Habits to Be An Effective Boss

To become a highly effective boss, embrace the following four habits:

1. Focus on improvement. Although it’s tempting to only scrutinize the numbers when measuring a company’s progress, qualitative matters count. Look at how employees try to boost their efficiency or learn from past mistakes.

Creating successful employees involves managing them as people, not as numbers or assets. The level of sales a department brings in doesn’t necessarily reflect all the work employees do and their efforts.

2. Be available to employees. Don’t just tell employees what to do; be approachable when employees need help. Promote transparent communication and position management as a resource to employees.

Welcome employee feedback and encourage staffers to ask questions. Demonstrate that employees’ queries and comments are listened to.

3. Help employees accomplish their goals. Extraordinary bosses focus on the success achieved by every employee. Instead of trying to create a few rock star employees, effective bosses want each individual to achieve results.

Effective bosses also ensure that every employee sets up goals to support the company’s progress as a whole. Encourage employees at every level to use their talents to help the entire team achieve more success. This way, no one is left behind and each employee can reach his or her highest potential.

4. Be a coach and supporter. Don’t assume employees know how to do everything. Leadership in the workplace is about helping employees grow, improve and succeed.

Coaching employees can be effective because a boss gives real-time feedback and guidance. Research by Towers Watson shows highly engaged employees receive feedback from management regularly.

If employees are struggling in a certain area, step in and guide them. Sometimes employees can become easily overwhelmed by a new project, so don’t hesitate to lend support.

Management effectiveness can determine a company’s success. Great bosses make employees want to stay at their jobs, while bad ones prompt them to leave.

via Join the League of Extraordinary Bosses: 4 Habits to Cultivate.

What Makes a Good Supervisor?

The main qualities required are:

Great communication skills: As a supervisor one must communicate clearly and correctly to avoid misunderstandings and frustrations. When receiving information from a subordinate, she should be sure to receive it correctly – There is no harm in asking again if necessary.
Adapt to the changes: World is changing at a fast pace. The efficient supervisors ought to keep up with it. Do not just blindly follow the age old norms and rules. Think out of the box if required. Adjust to the needs of the organization.
Value the employees: The people are any supervisor’s real asset. They are ones running the business and the work. A good supervisor understands their worth and treats them accordingly.
A coacher/mentor: Share your experience. A good supervisor shares her wisdom, knowledge and experience with the employees. She helps them perform better. This also strengthens the bond and the trust between them.
Disciplined: If a supervisor is disciplined then only can she expect the people to be so. The boss is an example – Come on time, meet the time-lines, set a behavioral code if necessary.
Feedback/incentives: Promotions, feedback, raises and accolades should be showered on the deserving people.
Be an example: Be hands on – Do not just always delegate. At times the boss should take on projects too. She may try picking up something less attractive or uninteresting and complete it wonderfully. This sets an example to all the team about taking up challenges and about how any work is important.
Be approachable: The employees should not hesitate in approaching the supervisor with their concerns and problems. An efficient supervisor will make sure that there is enough trust and openness between her and the employees for the latter to come to her with their grievances.
Be considerate: People are not just employees. They have families, friends and a life beyond work. Unless there is something urgent, do not make them work beyond the usual hours. Let them have their weekends and vacations. Be practical when setting the time-lines. This all will in turn improve the efficiency and the productivity of the employees.
Positive attitude: Be polite. Wish employees good mornings and be generous in thanking them. Inquire after about their families off and on.
Criticize constructively: When mistakes happen a good supervisor tries and understands the reasons behind the mishap. She criticizes or assesses the employee in proportion to the mistake. And it is always better to not to scream or scold in front of the others. Give constructive feedback; show them the right way to do things.

A supervisor ought not to take the power for granted and continue working on the qualities required to become a great supervisor.

via What Makes a Good Supervisor? 10 Qualities of a Good Supervisor.

Recommendations to Prevent Workplace Violence

The following are seven useful recommendations to help you prevent and resolve conflicts that could emerge within your organization.

Adopt and promote a prevention and reparation policy against harassment.

Create a prevention policy involving each level of the organization: management, employees and union representatives. For further assistance, feel free to consult the sample policies found on this website.
Make sure information about the new policy is widely distributed, that all employees know the policy and encourage everyone to make it their own.
Put a system in place to record all acts of violence by creating, for example, an Event Report Form.
Set up procedures to handle complaints impartially, confidentially and quickly. These should include measures to prevent any recurrence of harassment and other types of workplace violence. It is critical to ensure that the victim feels safe against retaliation and has the right, if needed, to be represented when interviewed by an independent and qualified investigator. Keep in mind that, in this case, lodging a formal complaint is not always the best solution since it often involves lengthy delays.
And finally, establish measures to support the victims and the alleged perpetrators.

Establish clear codes of conduct.

Define and communicate a clear code of conduct like ‘Zero-tolerance’ with respect to moral harassment and other types of workplace violence.
Make sure all employees know your organization’s code of conduct. These measures should reflect your organization’s commitment to preventing and responding to external acts of violence.
Try to reduce and even eliminate behaviour that contravenes your code of conduct by exercising dissuasion and enforcing sanctions.

Organize awareness and training sessions.

Take time to organize and provide access to awareness and training sessions on the prevention of workplace violence.
Open the necessary lines of communication to achieve your prevention objectives.

Do not allow conflicts to escalate into harassment or acts of violence.

Monitor the training of work teams. Working in teams highlights interpersonal relations and may give rise to some situations that could cause tension among people.
Deal with conflicts swiftly, and from the moment they begin. Harassment and violence stem from unresolved conflicts that fester. They can degenerate and turn the workplace into a hostile environment and create negative occurrences that are violent and costly.

Set up effective lines of communication.

Open effective lines of communication, because aggressors thrive on the silence of victims and witnesses. Communication is a key factor in the well-being of employees.
Promote communication and regular meetings of your work teams. Strong lines of communication will not only rally employees against violence, they also reduce the risk of workplace violence by defusing tensions and clarifying situations and misunderstandings.

Pay special attention to the quality of relationships among members of a work team.

Ensure that work is meaningful for each worker.
Manage work teams to help prevent and resolve violent situations.

Encourage the acceptance of individual differences.

Communicate the idea that the strength of a team resides in individual differences (We need each other to make a winning team. The “differences” in each team member makes the strength of the team and enhances the team’s performance.)
Where possible, plan social or training activities that help team members get to know each other and discover each other’s strengths and weaknesses, from a standpoint of openness to such differences and of acceptance of each team member’s willingness to improve interpersonal relations.

via Basic recommendations for preventing violence in the workplace.

What Makes a Good Supervisor?

It takes personal confidence to become a successful supervisor. Building that level of personal confidence requires learning supervisory skills. A supervisor’s job is to establish goals and lead a team of people to achieve them. Leadership requires stepping out in front with new, creative ideas that save money, increase productivity and establish credibility and respect from employees.

via Define Supervisory Skills | Chron.com.

Cost to Treat Hepatitis C -$1000 a Pill

Sofosbuvir (brand name Sovaldi) is a drug developed by Gilead Sciences used to treat hepatitis C infection. In combination with other therapies, Sofosbuvir can effectively cure hepatitis in 90 percent of patients. It inhibits the RNA polymerase that the hepatitis C virus (HCV) uses to replicate its RNA. It was discovered at Pharmasset and developed by Gilead Sciences.

The cost of Sofosbuvir is $1000 per pill taken daily for 12 to 24 weeks. That is $84,000 to $168,000 for a course of treatment.

via Sofosbuvir – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Sexual Harassment

It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.

Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.

Both victim and the harasser can be either a woman or a man, and the victim and harasser can be the same sex.

Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).

The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.

via Sexual Harassment.

How to Create a Motivating Workplace

The workplace environment affects how the employees perform and feel about their jobs. A motivating workplace encourages employees to work harder, which allows them to advance and succeed while your business gets ahead. The employees may also be more satisfied with their jobs when the environment motivates them at the office. Money often comes to mind as a motivating factor for employees, but other strategies also work to encourage improved work performance from all staff members.

Step 1 – Write the policies, procedures and expectations for the office in a handbook for all employees. The written manual teaches employees what you want from them so they have a framework for behavior in the office. Knowing what is expected helps motivate employees because they know how to follow company standards to succeed.
Step 2 – Implement company policies universally so all employees are treated equally and held to the same standards. This creates a sense of fairness that is a motivator for employees. If employees feel that certain employees are treated better than others, they won’t be as motivated to work hard.
Step 3 – Establish a reward program to recognize employee achievement. Create guidelines for receiving recognition through the program.
Step 4 – Apply raises consistently using set criteria. Raises based on performance helps motivate employees to work hard.
Step 5 – Create work goals for each employee with her help. Meet with her to write the goals together. Use your performance evaluations as a time to write goals and evaluate past goals.
Step 6 – Communicate with your employees on a regular basis, particularly if change within the company occurs. Uncertainty and lack of information promotes gossip and worries employees, which can chip away at their motivation.
Step 7 – Assign leadership opportunities to employees who show they are able to handle the responsibility. Allow the employees to take the lead on projects without hovering over every move they make.
Step 8 – Present all employees with educational opportunities related to work. Send employees to trainings or conduct your own sessions in the office.

via How to Create a Motivating Workplace | Chron.com.

The HR Department as a Revenue Enhancer

To many CEOs and CFOs, the HR department as a revenue enhancer takes getting used to. That’s not the way they were taught.

They are more interested in the payoff and are asking appropriate questions: What’s in it for the company? Where is the improvement in the revenue stream? How does this get us new customers and retain our current customers. Where is the proof of corporate performance enhancement metrics?

Once they get solid answers to these questions from competent HR leaders, the CEOs are quick to change their thinking. To answer the payoff questions, recognize that a continual company-wide value chain analysis is critical to the success of any organization.

Over the past decade, CEOs began demanding that their Human Resources departments deliver flawless functional work and become a knowledgeable partner with all other disciplines to advance the business plan of the company.

Individual professional silos are breaking down. Disciplines such as finance, sales, marketing, operations, and HR no longer exist as stand alone entities. They are inter-dependent with one another. Weakness of any one of the links inhibits other links from maximizing their efficiency and productivity.

via Human Resources Department As a Profitability Factor.

Employer Liability for Harassment

The employer is automatically liable for harassment by a supervisor that results in a negative employment action such as termination, failure to promote or hire, and loss of wages. If the supervisor’s harassment results in a hostile work environment, the employer can avoid liability only if it can prove that: 1) it reasonably tried to prevent and promptly correct the harassing behavior; and 2) the employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or corrective opportunities provided by the employer.

The employer will be liable for harassment by non-supervisory employees or non-employees over whom it has control (e.g., independent contractors or customers on the premises), if it knew, or should have known about the harassment and failed to take prompt and appropriate corrective action.

When investigating allegations of harassment, the EEOC looks at the entire record: including the nature of the conduct, and the context in which the alleged incidents occurred. A determination of whether harassment is severe or pervasive enough to be illegal is made on a case-by-case basis.

via Harassment.

The Advantages of Human Resource Management Strategy

Strategic human resource management is the process of linking the human resource function with the strategic objectives of the organization in order to improve performance. Adopting an HR strategy that is concerned with the organization’s larger mission and goals has multiple advantages and benefits for the company.

Helps Evaluate HR Policies – The premise of strategic HRM is that the company’s policies and procedures related to employees should fit into the organization’s broader strategic plan. Developing these links between HR and strategy has the distinct advantage of helping the organization to evaluate its current HR policies and to replace outdated or inefficient policies with ones that promote a better workplace environment and employee relations. As the company evaluates its HR policies, it can use the strategic plan’s aims and objectives to evaluate each HR process. Those that fall out of the strategic vision can be reformulated or discarded in favor of better ones.
Team-builiding – Strategic HRM also helps to foster a sense of team spirit and camaraderie within the organization. A company’s strategic vision will ideally rely on input from a broad range of stakeholders including managers, employees, customers and investors. Creating an HR strategy that aligns with this sense of open communication can have the major benefit of helping stakeholders feel like their opinions are valued and meaningful to the company’s owners and executives.
Helps Monitor Progress – While the strategic vision of the company can influence the creation and evaluation of HR policies, the reverse can also be true. Human resources can help the organization monitor its progress toward achieving its stated goals and objectives in the strategic plan. Much of the strategic plan is likely to rely on the cooperation and support of employees and individual departments or functions within the organization. HR has a key role to play in making sure that all of these components of the strategic plan are implemented in a timely and effective way. The advantage of this marriage between strategy and HR management is that the company’s executives and its HR function are consistently monitoring one another’s progress and tweaking processes for the benefit of the company and its employees.
Keeps the Organization Legal – A final advantage of the human resource management strategy is in keeping the organization compliant with laws relating to employees, salary, insurance and the like. The laws and policies governing business are complex and can vary between jurisdictions, but HR has a key role to play in making sure that the organization’s strategic plan is not only presently legal but is also amendable enough that it can adapt to changing times and changing legal circumstances.

via The Advantages of the Human Resource Management Strategy | Chron.com.