HSA530 Week 6 Lecture 2: Health Services Human Resource Management – Documentation
| Slide # | Topics | Narration |
| Slide 1 | Intro | Welcome to Health Services Human Resource Management.
In this lesson, we will discuss documentation. Next slide. |
| Slide 2 | Topics | The following topics will be discussed in this lesson.
Paper remains important; Legal implications of employment documentation; Human resources and personnel files; The department manager’s responsibilities; Department manager’s employee files; and Do the paperwork. Next slide. |
| Slide 3 | Paper Remains Important | We will begin this lesson with discussing paper remains important.
Many documents are intended for simple record-keeping. Indexes and other records ensure that particular documents are available for reference of other ordinary business purposes if needed. However, in recent decades, an increasing amount of documentation has been created and maintained largely as protection against legal challenges. Documentation can be troublesome for a department manager in two ways. The first is when it is not available and appears never to have existed. The other is when documents do exist but are weak, inaccurate, or incomplete. Next slide. |
| Slide 4 | Legal Implications of Employment Documentation | Employment documentation is always important when responding to charges of discrimination. If requested documentation cannot be produced, the worst is often assumed. Some records are retained on the basis of common sense. There may be legitimate needs to retrieve the information they contain at some time in the future. Other records are retained because of external or legal requirements. All federal laws that address aspects of employment include requirements for record retention. In most organizations, retaining records is a continuing responsibility of HR.
The threshold for retaining most employment documentation is six years. This is the statutory limit for filing most employment related charges arising from violations of the Civil Rights Act. Many organizations simply assume that all personnel files must be permanently retained. Employees come and go, in the process generating files that become inactive. Employees that remain for many years often generate thick files over the course of their employment. The net result is that HR has a considerable records retention challenge. Next Slide. |
| Slide 5 | Human Resources and Personnel Files | A department manager may expect to hear from HR when documentation is not forthcoming. Performance appraisals and disciplinary actions are most likely to require additional input or actions. Depending on organizational policy, licensure information may be an HR responsibility. Department managers may have the responsibility to ensure that care- givers renew their licenses in a timely fashion and submit copies for their personnel files. Organizations occasionally maintain a separate central license repository. Regarding disciplinary actions, organizational personnel policies may include guidelines governing disciplinary actions. Written warnings in employee files are often considered to expire after a period of time if subsequent related infractions do not occur. To comply with such a policy, HR must monitor written warnings and invalidate them as needed. Human resources staff may not purposively review all personnel files to remove expired warnings. However, when expired warnings are encountered, they should be removed and placed in a separate file. The objective of a warning is to correct behavior.
Next Slide. |
| Slide 6 | The Department Manager’s Responsibility | Every organization should have an employee handbook, and all department managers and supervisors should be familiar with its contents. Two reasons support this suggestion. The first is for personal knowledge and use, because managers are employees as well as supervisors. The second is to answer employee questions. Managers must be able to handle general questions about the handbook’s contents and must know how and where to secure clarification of any of the book’s contents.
An organization’s personnel policy and procedure manual is ordinarily issued by HR. Most policies are prepared by HR directly or by using input from other organizational units and distributed by HR. In most organizations, every department has a copy of the manual. Larger departments may have multiple copies. Sometimes department managers directly receive requests for information about particular employees, requests from outsiders who have—usually deliberately—bypassed human resources or other channels such as administration. Requests for employee information from outside of the organization should not be honored. Next Slide. |
| Slide 7 | Department Manager’s Employee Files | Regardless of the amount of information contained, supervisors should always maintain a separate file folder for each employee. This avoids any charge of favoritism or discrimination by denying any employees the opportunity to claim that files were kept selectively or that some employees were watched while others were allowed to go their own way. A few items can be retained for every employee.
First-line managers are busy people, and they often tend to skimp on informal documentation. Negative comments seem to get written up more often than positive comments; these are supposedly “important” in that they may lead eventually to larger problems or necessary counseling or disciplinary action. Positive comments often do not get entered for employees who do something commendable. However, positives can be just as important as negatives—even more important to the employees themselves—to capture in a manager’s anecdotal note file. Next Slide. |
| Slide 8 | Do the Paperwork | Many problems occur after the fact because of documentation that is missing or incomplete. Instances of incomplete documentation are common in every organization. These include forms that are not completely filled out, papers that are not signed, and information that is illegible or incomplete. An ongoing and recurring problem is documents that lack dates. Enter a date on any paper before adding any words. This simple act can prevent many problems associated with documentation.
Next Slide. |
| Slide 9 | CYU | |
| Slide 10 | Summary | Paper records are essential. The human resources (HR) department has an important role concerning employee personnel files. Department managers and supervisors share in documentation responsibilities. Relevant documents include personnel files, job descriptions, employee handbooks, and policy and procedure manuals. Departmental files are important but temporary. Human resources has the job of maintaining long-term files. Paperwork is necessary and should be completed in a timely fashion. Without proper and complete records, an important matter, issue, or event is considered never to have occurred.
While this chapter emphasizes several forms of documentation, medical records are excluded. Two general classes of employment documents are included. The first of these encompasses formal documentation that results primarily from adhering to laws or regulatory requirements. This includes the majority of items found in an employee’s personnel file. The second class is informal documentation. These papers are not required by law or regulations but are deemed to be helpful when running an organization. Examples include internal reports, statistics, meeting minutes, anecdotal notes, and personal reminders. This completes the lesson. |
