Attention HR Professionals: Have Diversity, Discrimination, and Unconscious Bias Been Grabbing Your Attention Lately?

For any organization, Human Resources is one of the most complicated and fastest-changing areas of business management—and one that is fraught with liability.

Add the challenges of running a medical practice and addressing the newly focused-upon issues of discrimination and equity, and Human Resources managers in this field have their hands full.

Meet HR Hero—a Business and Learning Resources (BLR) portal provided to Physicians Insurance members to help mitigate your employment liability. HR Hero is a collection of online state-specific and federal employment-law resources for HR professionals, created to help them find quick answers to their employment-law and management questions, maintain a positive and productive workplace, and avoid devastating lawsuits. Users of HR Hero can rely on the expertise of employment-law experts in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for assistance with employment-law compliance and strategic planning via tools with customization options for each organization.

“A resource like HR Hero is preventative care for those with HR responsibilities,” says Susan Brodeur, a representative from BLR who provides and maintains content on HR Hero. “Any HR mistake can potentially become a claim, so HR Hero is a crucial support resource to access for guidance on HR issues, in advance, to avoid mistakes and hopefully mitigate the likelihood of possible claims.”

Further, HR Hero offers customizable instructor-led training resources that include course materials for group trainings on more than 165 HR topics, in the form of “10-minute trainer” documents and customizable slides with supporting documents such as exercises, handouts, quizzes, and speaker notes. With your access, several topics can be delivered in a narrated training for your group, so all you need to do is press Play.

ACCESSING DIVERSITY AND DISCRIMINATION RESOURCES IN HR HERO

“Unconscious-bias training is a newer course and is increasingly popular,” Brodeur says. “Everyone has some unconscious bias, and it’s important to explore this topic with both supervisors and employees in order to get at the root of recognizing and overcoming potential discrimination issues.” Sexual-harassment, diversity, and workplace training resources are also available.

To access HR Hero, log into either phyins.com/resources or medchoicerrg.com/resources, click the link to HR Hero, then select “TRAINING” and search for the resources that fit your needs. You can use filters to select, for example, “Discrimination” and “Diversity” topics to find training documents such as the following PowerPoint presentations and handouts, which you can customize with your organization’s logo and other information:

  • Recognizing and Overcoming Unconscious Bias for Employees and Supervisors
  • Title VII Discrimination—What Supervisors Need to Know
  • Diversity for all Employees (English and Spanish)
  • Diversity Fundamentals for Supervisors
  • Generational Diversity
  • Interrupting Unconscious Bias for Supervisors
  • Managing Non-English-Speaking Employees
  • Preventing Discrimination in the Workplace

IMPORTANCE OF THE EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK

In addition, two of the most popular HR Hero tools are the Employee Handbook Builder and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Audit and Classification tool. “The employee handbook is the most important HR document,” Brodeur says. “If a problem arises, it is likely that an employee’s attorney will request a copy of it.” She urges all organizations to make sure their handbooks are updated and not missing essential elements. HR Hero’s Employee Handbook Builder generates an employee handbook with updates specific to the user’s needs—including state addendums—that can be downloaded. Policies regarding discrimination, sexual harassment, and substance use are part of a handbook and should also be part of a training program, which the resource can support.

The FLSA Audit and Classification tool is a step-by-step assessment of an individual job that helps determine whether the position should be paid on an hourly basis or if it can be salaried (exempt). The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, record-keeping, and youth-employment standards affecting full-time and part-time employees in the private sector and in federal, state, and local governments. Some of the federal rules for determining salaried and hourly status have changed effective January 2020, and the Biden administration is reviewing exemption rules as well, so businesses should use the tool to aid in complying, Brodeur says.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES INCLUDE:

  • A state-law compliance chart builder
  • Self-audit checklists
  • A regulatory analysis that summarizes details to aid understanding
  • A job-description builder
  • A salary finder for more than 2,500 job titles
  • Email-based support from employment-law experts—with a typical turnaround time of 24 hours, responses come with details to save for your files

“If you aren’t sure about something, ask before you act,” Brodeur says. “It’s easier to prevent a mistake than to resolve one.”


Finding Additional Resources

Physicians Insurance and MedChoice RRG provide their clients with resources to help mitigate liability. Many of these resources can be found online in our password-protected websites.

Look for HR Hero in the Resource Libraries found at either phyins.com/resources or medchoicerrg.com/resources.