The U.S. Department of Labor (DoL) announced the release of a new Web tool yesterday (May 19), designed to help employers understand their responsibility to record and report work-related injuries and illnesses. This tool promotes compliance with Human Resource (HR) requirements 0f Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations.

Your employee policies and procedures should address HR compliance issues like OSHA recordkeeping. The OSHA Recordkeeping Advisor helps employers and those responsible for organizational safety and health quickly determine:

• Whether an injury or illness is work-related;
• Whether a work-related injury or illness needs to be recorded; and
• Which provisions of the regulations apply when recording a work-related injury or illness.

To help you determine what action(s) to take, the OSHA Recordkeeping Advisor leads you through an online questionnaire. To see the OSHA Recordkeeping Advisor and questionnaire, see www.dol.gov/elaws/osharecordkeeping.htm.

This Advisor is one of a series of online compliance assistance products from OSHA.  The elaws (Employment Laws Assistance for Workers and Small Businesses) Advisor is developed by DOL to help employers and employees understand federal HR employment laws. For a complete list of elaws Advisors, visit the elaws web site at: www.dol.gov/elaws. To learn more about DOL’s occupational safety and health program, visit the OSHA web site at www.osha.gov.  For help with your employee policies and procedures check out the Human Resources Policies, Procedures and Forms manual from Bizmanualz.

In October, 2009, we discontinued shipment of the 3-ring-bound version of our policy and procedure manuals. It was a relatively easy decision, as more and more of our customers chose the downloadable version of our manuals over the binder. They were pleased to save on shipping and material costs. It also helped that we simplified the download process, thanks to invaluable customer feedback.

Prior to October, we began publishing most of our policies and procedures manuals in hardbound form, similar to a textbook, and made them available for sale through online retailers. So when we started receiving enquiries about “hard copy” versions of our manuals in recent weeks, we decided to offer the hardbound procedures books as add-ons.

You can now buy (for an additional $100 per) a hardbound procedure book as an add-on to nine of our policies and procedures manuals and the popular management  procedures bundles. The content of each hardbound book is identical to the MS-Word manual you download when you purchase it in electronic form.

To buy the hardbound books, simply choose the appropriate option (Download Only vs. Download + Hard Cover Book) when you place the product in your shopping cart.

Our goal is to ensure your satisfaction by providing the delivery option you desire. We won’t be selling the hardbound books as stand-alone products on our website, but they will continue to be available from online retailers like Amazon.com.

After about a decade in Clayton, Missouri (a St. Louis suburb), Bizmanualz is moving today. Moving isn’t an easy project, as many of you (I’m sure) are aware.

Our phone lines and internet connectivity may be intermittent for most of today and tomorrow, September 28 and 29, so bear with us if your phone call goes unanswered or your emails are not returned soon enough. The best way to contact us during the move is through our online contact form. Note, however, that our website servers will be unaffected and online orders will go through as usual.

Our new address will be:

4633 World Parkway Circle, Suite 1
St. Louis, MO, USA 63134

Our phone numbers, etc., will not change.

This move is necessary for various business reasons. The building we’re moving into belongs to the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) and houses UMSL’s Small Business and Technology Development Center, which is supported by the IT Entrepreneur Network. As we work toward the release of our policy and procedures management software, this support network will be extremely important and beneficial for us and, more importantly, our customers.

We’ll certainly miss the extraordinary view from the 22nd floor of the Sevens Building, but the new building is very near the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and our fellow tenants are startups or small businesses in the IT, biotech, and consulting sectors.

The sense of camaraderie among the different businesses is strong and the building is ideal for technology infrastructure and collaborative work. All this, we hope, will help our software venture succeed.

We’ll keep you posted as we settle into our new workspace. It’s exciting!

“Can I buy just the one procedure I need right now?”

We’ve been hearing this question quite often and our standard response has been that we don’t sell procedures separately. It seemed to make sense that companies should have a range of policies and procedures on hand. After all, everyone thinks in terms of systems of interconnected policies and procedures, don’t they?

Then we thought, “Why not give our customers what they want!” After all, all our policy and procedure manuals have a collection of Microsoft Word files — procedures, policies, and support documents (forms, checklists, etc.). If our customers want to buy the documents individually, why not make it possible?

That’s how www.policiesprocedures.com was born. We essentially took procedure files from seven of our policies and procedures manuals and made them available for sale individually, so now you can buy and download one or more of these 200+ policy and procedure templates from the new website.

If customers could buy individual procedures à la carte, one obvious follow-up question was, “Why would anybody need to buy an entire manual?” Simple — because they get more. Not only more procedures, but supporting content — in short, a system of policies and procedures. In the “real world”, policies and procedures don’t exist in isolation. They interact, as the ISO 9001 points out, simply but eloquently.

Each of our policy and procedure manuals has a section on Manual Preparation, as well as a sample Manager’s Manual (and often a detailed guide or handbook). If you purchase the HR Procedures Manual, for instance, you get 35 HR procedures, a free Employee Handbook, a sample HR Manager’s Manual, links to dozens of Federal HR posters, and more than 50 sample job descriptions!

From a cost-to-value standpoint, once you exceed a handful of procedures (10 or more), it makes sense to purchase the entire manual. However, if you just need a few procedures to fill out your quality system, your accounting system, or any system you have in mind, the new policy and procedure download site may be exactly what you need.

So, visit our new site. Scroll or browse around and buy what you need. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know — we’re more than happy to help!

We are currently testing our new policies and procedures document compliance software, and plan to release it for customer testing in the near future. Potential testers have been asking a number of questions. Here are questions, and the answers:

Is your policy management software accessed as a service over the Internet (Software as a Service – SaaS) or must your policy solution be installed on your computers?

Bizmanualz policy management software is in fact a ‘software-as-a-Service’ available as a subscription over the Internet. The first time a user accesses the service, a small amount of code loads on the client machine in about 30 seconds, similar to when using GoToMeeting or any number of on-line services. The user never is required to install, launch or maintain any software.

Can we upload our existing documents into the system?

You can upload all your existing documents into the system, and open them, so long as your local machine has the software that was used to create the document. For example, MS WORD documents are can be uploaded. In fact, Bizmanualz publishes the world’s most complete set of pre-written policies and procedures, all in MS WORD format. Any policies and procedures template that you buy from us comes pre-loaded in the software. We keep the templates up to date; but we don’t change any documents that you save, upload or change, even if the document started as a Bizmanualz template.

Are documents easy to update?

Documents are edited in their native software on your local machine; they are saved to our server. Our system tracks and controls all document revisions so everyone accesses the latest version. It’s easy to roll back to a previous version if necessary.

Are employees or other users notified when a policy changes or is updated?

Notifications of policy changes are sent by e-mail to policy document authors and ‘followers.’  Administrators and document authors can assign ‘follower’ rights to any user for any document. Users can independently follow any document to which they have permission. Followers receive e-mail notifications of all policy changes. There are also announcement and action item screens within the policy management software that can be used to communicate information about documents.

Can multiple users access policies and procedures at the same time?

Yes, any number of users can access your policy and procedure documents. If two people work on the same document at the same time, their work will be saved (but not released) as two separate drafts. Built-in compliance workflow assures that only one draft can be released, so there are never multiple releases of the same policies and procedures document floating around.

How do you price your policy management software? Do you charge by the seat, or do you sell one license for the whole organization?

We charge per seat. Released policy and procedure documents are published to a web-based reader module which can be viewed by anyone you want. Typically, that would include all your employees and your auditors if you have a formal quality system.

We have an Intranet for reading our documents on-line. How does your software work with Intranets?

If you already have an intranet or a document publishing platform (SharePoint for example) and want to keep using it, our editor module can ftp documents to your existing publishing platform so that user’s viewing habits don’t have to change. But your editors and document managers would benefit from using our editor module for policy and procedure document control, workflow, version control, notifications, etc. while your general employee population would continue to read documents as they’re doing now.

Can I assign different levels of access to users and documents?

We offer a full access control at the document, user and department level. That is, all users assigned to, for example, the accounting department can be granted permission to all accounting procedures with a global command. Additional restrictions can be placed on individuals within a department. Access privileges can also be set at the document level.

Is your policy management software compliant with my quality management or document control requirements?

Yes, the Bizmanualz policy management software is consistent with the document control requirements of all ISO quality management systems, government and industry standards and regulations.

This Monday, May 24, the American Society for Quality (ASQ) brings its annual World Conference on Quality and Improvement to St. Louis, Missouri. For three-plus days, some of the “best and brightest” in the field of quality are coming to one place to share their insights, real-life successes, and some of the challenges in developing, implementing, and maintaining quality management systems.

The WCQI agenda looks like this:

• Thursday-Sunday, May 20-23 – Preconference courses, such as the CQA exam refresher, and leadership meetings;
• Monday, May 24 – Conference opens; keynote address; lectures, presentations, and networking;
• Tuesday, May 25 – Keynote speech; lectures and workshops; and
• Wednesday, May 26 – Workshops, a Six Sigma Forum panel discussion, networking, and the closing session, which includes the presentation of the International Team Excellence Award.

There are presentations and workshops for everyone, from those who are just getting acquainted with quality to those who want to add to their already extensive knowledge of quality concepts and techniques.

Sponsors and exhibitors at the World Conference include:

• Bizmanualz;
  
• Abbott;
• Boeing;
• GE Healthcare;
• The Juran Institute;
• Minitab; and
• Northrup Grumman.

Coincidentally (or not), the ASQ’s event takes place at the same time as National Small Business Week in the U.S. (Wouldn’t it be great to get some cross-pollination of ideas between these two outstanding events?)

If you’re going to be at the WCQI, please look us up; we’re at booth #1013. If you can’t make it, keep watching our blog. We’ll be giving our take on the World Conference in the coming days.

April 28 is World Day for Safety and Health at Work, according to the AFL-CIO, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, and numerous other labor organizations. These organizations, as well as the International Labor Organization (a United Nations agency) and others, observe World Day for Safety & Health at Work to draw attention to the need for accident and illness prevention in the workplace.

This celebration is an integral part of the Global Strategy on Occupational Safety and Health of the ILO.  April 28 is also the day on which the world’s trade union movement commemorates victims of occupational accidents and diseases.

This year’s theme is “Emerging Risks and Patterns of Prevention in a Changing World of Work”. There are newly emerging hazards and risks. Furthermore, the relationship between employer and worker, the demographic of the world’s workforce, patterns of work, and types of work are all changing. These changes, in turn, affect how occupational safety and health are managed at workplace, regional, national, and international levels.

SafeWork, the program on Safety and Health at Work and the Environment, has a number of helpful materials available for download at the ILO web site. You may also wish to visit the following sites:

• Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS);
• American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO);
• April 28-Day of Mourning (on Facebook), in association with the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

What would you say if I told you that by saving time and paper, you can save a bundle of money, too?  Well, that’s exactly what Bizmanualz is offering in the month of April.

Last week, we launched the “Bizmanualz Green Initiative” to encourage you to download our products and save paper and fuel. (Did you know there’s about a ream of paper in each of our printed products? That’s close to six pounds!) By downloading your policies and procedures documents, you save time.  And during April, downloading saves you money, because we’re discounting all download-only policy and procedure manuals. Now that’s a real win-win situation!

Here’s how the Bizmanualz Green Initiative works: We are offering $100 off any procedures manual you purchase as “download only”. Given that our average manual is over 500 pages long, we’re talking about saving a significant amount of paper! And, since we don’t incur material, processing, and shipping costs when you download, we’ll pass along the savings to you, our customer!

What does this mean? You save on every manual you purchase! In other words, save a bundle when you buy a bundle!

When you purchase the 9-manual CEO Company Procedures Series, you’ll instantly save $900 off an already heavily discounted price. Similarly, when you buy the 5-manual CFO Accounting Procedures Series, you save an additional $500. Even if you’re not ready to buy one of the Procedure Series, you still save $100 for each “download-only” individual procedures manual that you purchase.

If you’re thinking about starting your policies and procedures project, this is the best time to do it! The Bizmanualz Green Initiative runs during the month of April only! The incredible savings won’t last long!

Thoroughly researched, complete, and easily editable policies and procedures from Bizmanualz save you countless hours of research and writing time. Why start from scratch when you can get expertly assembled content at your fingertips within minutes?

Like to see what’s in our manuals? Download a free sample. If you have any questions, we’re here to help. Simply call (USA toll free, 1-800-466-9953; outside the USA, 314-863-5079) or contact us online.

Hurry! Buy your policies and procedures manuals from Bizmanualz today!

Here are ten great reasons to attend the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement, coming to St. Louis, Missouri, this May:

1. Bizmanualz will be there! Look for our booth, where we’ll be showing off our new policies and procedures management software.

2. One of the strongest ASQ sections (#1304) in the country is here. Any of our knowledgeable and personable members will be more than happy to assist you while you’re here.

3. The largest gathering of quality professionals in one place means a myriad of opportunities for exchanging quality information and ideas.  A wise dude once said, “Ideas flourish best in the light of day.”

4. There will be dozens of quality training opportunities. Register early for a seminar…or two…or more!

5. The ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement takes place in late May. That’s generally one of the best times of year — weatherwise — in St. Louis, though as someone once said about St. Louis weather, “If you don’t like (it), wait a while…it’ll change.”

6. St. Louis is home to Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, Crown Candy Kitchen, Forest Park (one of the largest city parks in the nation), and the St. Louis Cardinals.

7. Arm+Leg > Cost of Parking. Same goes for the cost of meals, lodging, entertainment, and just about anything else you can think of.

8. The Cardinals aren’t in town (they’ll be in San Diego), so you’ll be spared the huge crowds. On the other hand, you’ll miss the game-day sea of red shirts and caps that washes into downtown. (More than awe-inspiring, it’s scary!)

9. Quality speakers like:

• Alan Mulally, Ford CEO;
• Robert Stephens, “Geek Squad” founder; and
• Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity.

10. First one to register for the Quality Conference after March 24 AND send me their proof of registration gets me as a guide for the evening of May 24. (We’ll work out the details.)

There are many, many more outstanding reasons to be here! Don’t miss this event! The World Conference on Quality and Improvement is only two months away, so make your plans!

See you in St. Louis!

This is taken directly from the DoL’s e-mail notice, sent on March 18, 2010:

“The Department’s Employment and Training Administration and Wage and Hour Division published a final rule implementing changes to the H-2A program effective March 15, 2010.  One of the requirements in the rule (italics added) is for employers who employ H-2A workers to display a new H-2A poster where employees can readily see it.

“The poster is also available in Spanish.  It will be made available in other languages in the coming months.

“Please see the ‘elaws FirstStep Poster Advisor‘ for assistance on what other federal employment posters are required.”

We recommend that you visit the “elaws” home page if you haven’t been there recently, to catch up on Department of Labor requirements and notices. If you want — or need — to be informed of developments in the DoL as they occur, subscribe to their e-mail newsletter.