There is often so much going on in a company that what gets a managers attention is what can make your company money, what costs your company money and what keeps you customers happy but sometimes, there are things that just need to be done right.

In certain industries like healthcare, engineering, consulting, and other professional industries, employees have a lot of licenses, certifications, immunizations, background checks and human resource forms that require up keeping. In the best of cases, a manager will delegate the up keep of employee credential management to an admin who will make up their own process of credential management often involving a file cabinet and maybe a spread sheet. In the worst case, the company will leave credential upkeep to each of their own employees hoping that as professionals, they will keep their own credentials current. (Most managers, who kept credetials update themselves, just don’t realize how hard it is to keep  credentials updated ) However, in all of these cases, we often see huge amounts of out of compliance credentials when a client from a old fashion process to credential management software. Often, out of compliance credentials don’t get noticed until their is an audit or when an employee makes an error with the company being sued.

There are three key things that a manager should consider in good credential management. One, is that proper credential management requires the right tools to be done correctly/efficiently. Second, is that you are putting your company at a huge financial risk by not ensuring that employee’s credentials are properly updated. Third, if you look at keeping credentials updated as a moral issue, you will be much better off because you will add an emotion compenent to credential up keep.

Licenses, certifications, immunizations, background checks, HR forms; these were all intended to make sure that your employees have proper training and are qualified. You have a moral obligation to make sure that these professionals, who often are dealing with your customers, have everything in place and once you make the commitment from a moral perspective that you will be 100% compliant, you will find that your credential management will greatly improve. At Healthcareseeker.com (www.healthcareseeker.com), a company that places Registered Nurses on long term temporary assignments, they made a commitment that keeping their employee credentials updated was something they were going to be the best at. They felt they had a moral obligation because their nurses come in contact with patients all of the time and with the help of new software from Credential Agent (www.credentialagent.com), it really wasn’t that challenging to make sure they were 100% compliant. They later discovered that the money they  saved in labor due to the software allowed them to do the credential management job in less time, which more then made up for the actually cost of the credential management software.

However, software or no software, it was the decision that keeping these credentials updated was a moral issue that has helped Hhealthcareseeker.com make sure they were doing a great job of protecting patients, our company and our nurses.