International Receptionist Day is just one day, but recognition of this important role should occur all year

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Jean Eaton in Blog, Guest Post

A Guest Post by Nelson Scott

It seems at times that receptionists “don’t get no respect,” to paraphrase the late comedian Roger Dangerfield.

To some eyes, the job just consists of answering the phone, directing visitors to “have a seat” while waiting for their appointments, and maybe a few other tasks.

This is why the second Wednesday of May each year is designated as International Receptionists Day (IRD). According to information on the website www.internationalreceptionistsday.com, the purpose of IRD is to “foster a recognition of the importance of a receptionist's role.”

Being a receptionist is about much more than dealing with telephone calls or offering visitors coffee while they wait. Receptionists are often the first people visitors and callers encounter, and as such are the people who create initial impressions of the organization.

First Impressions Matter

Outsiders form an opinion of the organization on what the receptionist does and says. Receptionists are the face of the organization to the world.

If that first impression is negative, it will take several positive experiences to overcome that perception.

Some organizations get this. Rather than relying on the generic title “receptionist,” one company designated the person in this position as the “Manager of First Impressions.”

Recognition All Year

Hopefully, the focus on the contributions of receptionists will continue beyond this single day. The danger of designated days that pop up on the calendar throughout the year is that they create the impression that having acknowledged the contributions of receptionists, administrative professionals (fourth Wednesday in April) or teachers (October 5) on their designated day, we can check “recognize the receptionist” off our to-do list for another year and move on.

Bob Nelson, who initiated Employee Appreciation Day (first Friday in March) in 1994, shortly after publication of his book 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, described the concept of a designated day to recognize staff as “silly” in a 2015 article in Business Insider.

“I’m a big advocate of using recognition on a daily basis,” he is quoted as saying. “But I did want to have one day where we could call attention to the topic and have conversations about its importance.”

Designated dates are reminders that recognition is important and they create focus on specific positions.

The 3-F Approach

When looking for ways to mark IRD and other designated days, organizations frequently default to what I describe as the “3-F” approach: Food, Flowers and Fudge (and other Fattening treats). While there’s nothing wrong with expressing appreciation by taking receptionists to lunch, bringing them flowers or leaving a box of chocolates on their desks, I challenge you to be more creative when planning to celebrate your receptionist(s).

Make it Personal

Here are a few ideas to kick-start your creativity (you can likely come up with better ideas):

Leave a note of appreciation on the receptionist’s desk, where it will be the first thing that person sees in the morning.
Receptionists often bring coffee and tea to visitors while they wait. Turn things around by delivering a drink purchased from the receptionist’s favourite coffee shop to his/her desk.
Invite other staff to answer the question, “How does our receptionist support your work?” Have them write their responses in a card or a poster-sized sheet of paper which will be presented to the receptionist. Remind the staff that the more Explicit the description of the contribution, the greater the impact of their words.
Is there a job title that better captures the value that these individuals contribute to your organization? Ask other staff to devise titles, such as “Manager of First Impressions” that describe the essence of what receptionists do.

Recognizing receptionists—and all other staff members—is a good place to begin, but recognition should be ongoing. Recognition is a task that should never disappear from our to-do lists.

Nelson Scott

Nelson Scott – Guest Author

Nelson Scott is an Edmonton-based speaker, trainer and author who provides tools, tips and techniques to enable managers and supervisors to hire, engage and retain the right people. For more tips and articles about hiring and recognizing staff, subscribe to his newsletter Briefly Noted.

Contact Nelson here or Visit the website www.greatstaffrecognition.com or

Connect on LinkedIn or Twitter @NelsonScott_

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Can We Talk? (about something really important)

Posted on February 15, 2018 by Jean Eaton in Blog, Guest Post

Can We Talk? (about something really important)

A Guest Post by Grant Ainsley of Grant Ainsley, Inc.

One of the things I like about Saturday Night Live is, not only are some of its skits really funny, but they also make you think about society. A great example came last Saturday when Will Ferrell was part of a skit that featured a few couples having dinner when one of the women brought up the real-life story about actor Aziz Ansari, who hosted SNL last fall. I chuckled as each time someone in the skit started to talk about the sexual nature of the story, somebody would express alarm or take offence, regardless of how softly a statement was made.

That happens in real life. It's part of the change in society to be less judgmental, understanding and what some would call politically correct. That's why having an important conversation with somebody in the workplace has become so challenging.

We need to have difficult conversations though to move organizations forward, so here's a five-step plan to go through before you have your next important discussion.

Why Communication With Your Boss Sucks

I wrote a blog last week called Why Communication With Your Boss Sucks. It was very well read, according to my numbers from Google. I like to think it’s because the content was really strong, but it may just have been the catchy title. Either works I guess. The blog basically looked at two workplace surveys. One was a survey of employees and it showed the top three things people don’t like about their jobs relate to communication. Number one was poor communication with the boss. The other survey involved managers and it revealed almost 70% of managers feel uncomfortable communicating with employees when they have to do performance reviews and other managerial tasks. Those two surveys clearly show why workplace communication is such a problem. I made a couple of suggestions how I thought communication could be improved, but I didn’t have the space to go into detail about what people should do before they have an important conversation. Today I will.

My 5-Step Process

I believe before a manager speaks to an employee about something important, or vice versa, or before anyone has a crucial conversation with somebody from outside their organization, they should take a few minutes and go through a process to be prepared to get the most out of the conversation. My five-step process is built around five words – Plan, Practice, Listen, Counter and Close. This video tells the story quite well.

Plan

There are a few things the video didn’t cover, so let me provide a few more details. When you plan your crucial conversation, think about the one thing you want to get out of it. Doing that really helps you focus on the most important outcome of the discussion. Let’s say you’re a boss and want to change an employee’s behavior. If you decide that’s what you need to get out of the conversation, it becomes much easier to deal with the uncomfortable nature of the discussion, because knowing what you want becomes much like a goal. It also helps you measure the success of the conversation. Did you get what you wanted out of it, or to put it another way, were you successful in changing behavior?

Practice

Although it may be awkward, verbalize what you plan to say during the conversation. Say the words out loud. Do it in your office with the door closed, or under your breath at your desk if you don’t have a private space. You’ll find when you know what you plan to say, before you say it, you will say it better and much more confidence and conviction.

Listen

Listening is something you can’t do as you prepare, because it obviously needs to occur during the conversation. However, you can prepare some questions for the other person and then plan to allow the other person to speak. Questions control conversations. Just make sure you’re prepared to listen to the answer.

Counter

Take a moment to consider objections that the other person will likely make as a result of what you have to say. Hopefully the other person will agree with what you’re saying, or at least not have a problem with it. Unfortunately though, that’s not always human nature. It’s easier for people to blame someone or something else for a problem, or suggest that somebody else is a bigger offender than they are. Make sure you keep the discussion on track and not about something else.

Close

Don’t make the mistake of trying to wrap up the meeting as quickly as possible. Make sure you and the other person are crystal clear on what was discussed, what the plan of action is, dates to meet again are penciled in and anything that that allows both of you to fully understand where you stand. You have gone to the effort to prepare properly for the meeting and go through a difficult discussion, so take a little extra time to make sure you know what was agreed to. Plan, practice, and counter before the meeting and make sure you listen and close during the meeting and you’ll get a lot more out of crucial conversations. It might not be fun, but it should be beneficial.

Grant Ainsley is a former award-winning journalist and public relations professional who now works with politicians, business executives, association leaders and others to help refine their messages. He has spoken across the country about the news media, spending much of his time conducting media training sessions for organizations. He also does workshops for executives to improve their communication skills. Ainsley spent almost three decades in the news media, public relations and association management. His first career was in radio and for the majority of that time he was News and Public Affairs Director of 96 K-Lite Radio in Edmonton. In addition to managing the newsroom and assignments for reporters, he handled morning news anchor duties and either hosted or produced a daily talk show. Later, he was in charge of Public Relations for the City of Edmonton’s Public Works department and its 1,500 employees. While there, he was responsible for communications as Edmonton launched Canada’s first curbside waste recycling program. Ainsley then moved into association management and for over a decade was CEO of the Alberta branch of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association. In all three careers, he won national awards for his work. During his time in the media, Ainsley interviewed some of the most prominent names in Canada at the time, including Wayne Gretzky, John Chretien, John Candy, Rick Hansen and many others. He’s the author of the book The Honest Spin Doctor about media relations and lives in Edmonton, Alberta where he was born and raised.

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Communication, Grant Ainsley, media training, prepare for difficult conversations

Shared Health Record Project Includes Community Health Providers

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Jean Eaton in Blog, Guest Post

Are you a Community Healthcare Provider in Alberta?

The Alberta Netcare project, the provincial electronic health record (EHR), has been in development since 1999. The EHR is a secure and confidential electronic system of Alberta patient health information. The Shared Health Record Project is one of the latest Netcare initiatives.

One of the largest source of patient health information resides with community healthcare providers.

The Shared Health Record Project intends to provide the solution to integrate information from a healthcare providers' office based electronic medical record (EMR) into the provincial EHR to improve the communication between healthcare providers to better provide continuing care and treatment to the patient.

If you are a healthcare provider who believes that secure access to more patient health information can improve health outcomes, this article is for you!

In this guest author post, Lyuba Fleysher, Program Director, ConnectCare, provides an update of the Shared Health Record Project.

The primary goal of the Shared Health Record (SHR) Project is to establish a foundation for sharing clinical information between physician office electronic medical records (EMRs) and the Alberta Netcare EHR repositories managed by Alberta Health Services (AHS). The purpose of this integration is to support continuity of care and clinical decision-making.

It is well acknowledged that 70 to 80% of health services are delivered in community settings – outside of AHS programs and services. It was expected that provincial availability of information captured within physician office EMRs would support continuity of care and enhance patient safety by providing a more complete electronic health record (EHR).

The primary focus of SHR is on enabling system-to-system integration to access to information held in the Netcare EHR repositories managed by AHS and currently only available via the Netcare Portal.

Note this integration does not replace eDelivery of reports delivered to physicians who are named on the report.

The SHR implementation will:

Enable authorized users to search for, view, and download clinical documents (e.g. discharge summaries, consult reports, diagnostic imaging reports) and encounters via system-to-system messaging.
Include capabilities to automatically propagate report updates to providers who had downloaded and replicated copies of reports in their EMR (or paper chart) or requested receiving updates. The propagation of updates is to eliminate potential impact to patient safety of using incorrect or out-of-date information for clinical decision making.
Honor the patient’s expressed wishes for a Global Person-Level Mask (GPLM) and require users to provide a reason for unmasking the record if they wish to access a masked record.

The scope of the project includes implementation with a limited production rollout (LPR) of clinics that use the Alberta Qualified Services Provider (QSP) vendor – Microquest. However the SHR interface specifications will become an Alberta HISCA standard and be available for implementation with non-QSP (Alberta Qualified Services Provider) EMR vendors or other applications (e.g. Personal Health Portal).

The Shared Health Record (SHR) project is a key component of the Alberta Netcare Electronic Health Record (EHR). The SHR project is an initiative to further develop the value and completeness of the information shared within the provincial Netcare EHR, and enables further access to health information to support clinical decision making at the point of care.

The success of the Netcare EHR has been achieved by enabling access to demographic information, drug information, lab test result data, diagnostic imaging and other report information to physicians, pharmacists, hospitals, home care, and other health care professionals across the province. The goal of the next phase of the development of Netcare, as defined within the “Alberta Provincial Healthcare IM/IT Strategic Plan 2009-2015” , is to share relevant clinical information in addition to the information domains presently available within Netcare.

SHR is a concept that was developed by Canada Health Infoway. The Shared Health Record (SHR) is a mechanism for sharing person-specific clinically-relevant data not held in other domain repositories (e.g. DI, Lab, and Drug). The SHR is intended to hold a copy of subsets of information captured in the point of service (PoS) applications and should focus only on clinically relevant data appropriate for sharing. The following are types of information that Infoway suggests maybe included:

Basic Encounter Information
Referral Orders and Referral Notes
Encounter Summaries
Clinical Observations
Problems/Conditions/Diagnosis
Care Plans
Care Protocols
Health Status indicators

The SHR completed extensive consultation with stakeholders and established the following consensus:

The SHR should initially focus on Encounters, Reports, Immunizations/Adverse Reactions, Care Composition Profiles, Screenings and Alerts.
Both data integrity (accredited source, accuracy, timeliness) and presentation (the manner in which information is accessed from within the EHR) are paramount.
Conceptually, the SHR project should endeavor to allow the EHR to act as a “summary profile” which guides and points to client information supplied, managed and accredited by other distributed sources. This profile may be based on Client/Provider/Site Encounters.

Guest Author: Lyuba Fleysher, Program Director, ConnectCare, Alberta Netcare

For more information about the Shared Health Record, see: www.albertanetcare.ca/SharedHealthRecord.htm and www.ahs.ca/connectcare .

If you are using an EMR, contact your EMR representative to discover how the SHR integrates into your EMR.

Alberta, Alberta Netcare, Canada Health Infoway, health care, healthcare, shared health record

Guest Post – 8 Ways New Immigrants Can Create Effective Business Meetings

Posted on December 28, 2017 by Jean Eaton in Blog, Guest Post

8 Ways New Immigrants Can Create Effective Business Meetings

A Guest Post by Gord Sheppard of Create Awesome Meetings

Meetings

You can love meetings, or hate them. But no matter where you’re from you have become an expert at attending meetings in your new country if you want to succeed. From job interviews to staff meetings, volunteer meetings to senior leadership gatherings and more, how you communicate during meetings in your new country will make or break your immigration journey.

Barriers

Now imagine this scenario. You are a new immigrant who wants to work in Canada. In order to get a job and keep it you’ll probably have to:

Learn english
Upgrade your education
Deal with the reality that the first job you get will not be the job that you ultimately want and more

On top of all of this you’ll also have to learn how to be effective during every meeting that you attend. For example, if you don’t understand the way that most Canadians conduct a job interview meeting then it is likely that you won’t know how to act. So while you may have spent a lot of time on your resume, all of your effort could be wasted because you do something negative during the interview. The same concept applies to all of the meetings you attend once you get hired, as well as any volunteer meetings that you participate in.

Another problem (that you may not even be aware of) is that you are used to the way people conduct meetings in your home country. For example:

India – Many people don’t mind interrupting others during a meeting
Columbia – Many people will not question what the meeting leader says, because they have been brought up to not question the authority of their Catholic Priest
Barbados – Quite often meetings don’t start when they are supposed to because they are on ‘bajan time’

So how can you quickly adapt to make sure that your next meeting is as effective as possible?

8 Ways New Immigrants Can Create Effective Business Meetings

When I did a Keynote Speech called “How To Be Effective In Any Meeting” for 150 highly educated new Canadian immigrants at the Smart Connections event for ERIEC (Edmonton Region Immigrant Employment Council) I learned just how tough it is for new immigrants to conduct effective business meetings. The feedback from the audience included:

– My ability to speak English is not strong enough, so I often don’t understand what the other person is saying
– Where I’m from you’re supposed to wait to be told what to do, and sometimes meeting leaders in Canada want you to speak up first
– A woman would never be leading a meeting where I’m from, so how do I respond to a female meeting leader here?

So, because my mission is to help everyone learn how to have more productive and inspired meetings, I have put together this practical guide to help new immigrants quickly adapt to any type of meeting in Canada, no matter where you’re from.

1. Be Self-Aware

Great business meetings start with you

If you understand the good and the bad about yourself, then you can avoid behaving negatively during a meeting, and you can also bring out the best you have to offer so you can make the meeting fantastic. For example, let’s say you’re a highly qualified Accountant from India, and here’s what you know about yourself:

I’m really smart
I work hard
I don’t like it when people waste my time so I cut them off

To prepare for a job interview you will have to:

Practice being patient
Learn how to let the other person finish talking, no matter what they are saying
Learn how to appropriately brag about your excellent work ethic and ability to deliver outstanding results

2. Learn The Meeting Basics

You should be aware of how people behave during meetings in Canada compared to the way that you conduct meetings in your home country. For example, people in Japan hand a business card over with two hands and bow their heads as they do this. Whereas in Canada people often toss their business cards on the middle of the table.

create awesome meetings, create effective business meetings, Gord, Gord Sheppard, professional development