Author: David Slaughter, JD, Senior Content Specialist, Legal

Rules Attempt to Streamline ACA Benefits Summary

Proposed changes to the Summary of Benefits and Coverage rules under health care reform include additions and subtractions to the SBC template, as well as clarifications on how plan sponsors and insurers may apportion the responsibility to furnish the SBC to participants. A third example would be added to the cost-sharing examples required in the […]

Train Managers on These Four (Plus More) Tips for Making Tough Conversations Easier

  Managers—especially HR managers but others as well—are often called upon to engage employees in the most sensitive, uncomfortable conversations. The gamut extends from telling an employee he or she has bad breath to telling an employee that he or she is fired. These difficult conversations can be made easier by recognizing that once people […]

Do Your Employees Know These Four Tips for Delivering Bad News?

  Bad news is no fun to deliver. That’s why even distinguished leaders and otherwise successful people will go to great lengths to avoid doing it. For example, you make excuses to hold on to an underperforming employee. And admit it: You’ve almost certainly hung around in a problematic personal relationship (romantic or platonic) longer […]

9th Circuit Reverses Ruling on Participant’s Claim for Surcharge

Plan participants can recover personal, rather than plan, losses under arguments of “surcharge,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled, reversing an earlier opinion, which had been at odds with other federal circuits. On Dec. 16, the circuit court handed down the new ruling in Gabriel v. Alaska Elec. Pension Fund, 2014 WL 7139686 (9th […]

Ongoing Training on Job Descriptions Keeps Employees Engaged

  Ongoing training about job descriptions is “essential, since no job remains exactly the same from year to year,” say Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey, business, marketing, and corporate training experts and coauthors of The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways to Engage and Empower Your People. In fact, since “job descriptions are typically out of date […]