2022-05-16 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board May 16, 2022 MR. LEOPOLDINO: Yes. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. Okay, thank you. MR. LEOPOLDINO: You're welcome. Employee Enmement And Retention MR. LEOPOLDINO: And the next item on my director's report is "Employee Engagement and Retention." We're making some—we initiated discussions starting with our Personnel and Organizational Development Division that's with Jenny Sakamoto. I believe you've all have met her. She's taking the charge on developing programs in the area of engagement and retention. Although Recruitment is a huge part of filling our vacancies, there's another half to that which is the retention and engagement of these employees because we can keep filling positions all long. But if we don't have programs in place to keep these employees, make them happy, we're just going to be spinning our wheels. So, at the same time, we're implementing these programs with Recruitment. We're also starting to have discussions on employee engagement and retention. So, initially, our discussions started—we started discussing—starting this whole project with an employee engagement survey, which is currently being developed and discussed within that division. We also want to develop metrics. We felt the survey was a great place to start. But it's not only in implementing the survey, we want to make sure we take action on the survey. We have a lot of employees who feel, "Oh, they're just issuing another survey and that nothing's going to happen." So, before we roll out our survey, we want to make sure we have plans in place to address the issues that come out about the survey. So, we want to be very effective in the way we do it. Some other discussions we had is implementing a mentorship program and a coaching -type program within the County. So, these are the first topics that came up in our discussions. As you all know, engagement and retention there's so many different avenues we can take. So many different types of programs we can implement, but we want something that's effective. And so, that's kind of our initial discussions. I, kind of, had four ideas with engagement. So, Number 1 is metrics. I want to know what's keeping our employees with the County. What is making them stay. The second part is what would make them leave. And then, we want to make sure that we respond timely to any results that we get from these surveys—and in the future—like, when Page 17