2022-12-20 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board December 20, 2022 So, we include not only what HR is doing but what the County is doing to, kind of, appeal to the community. And so, social media also promotes and encourages a lot of engagement, right? Real-time engagement, real-time interaction—in fact, through this Mauna Loa eruption, civil fefense took to Facebook and they did a Facebook live. I don't know if any of you participated in that, but questions were answered real-time through that media outlet. And that's, kind of, our approach and we want to get there. But we wanted to establish a foundation through these social media sites. And so, I think we're doing a great job and we're on our way. Our next phase is to do more—what they call reels or short video clips—where we highlight our employees and what they're doing in the community. So, that's part of our next phase. So, that's kind of a real small snapshot of what we've been doing. What our focus is on our social media. And we have a six-paged—four-paged social media strategy in place that I'm transitioning over to work with Michelle on to which she's—like I said, she hit the ground running and she's doing an amazing job already. And she's only been with us for a month. So, very, very pleased. The second part of that is we created or we started hosting regular County of Hawaii community resource fairs. So, we had our second one in early December at the Prince Kuhio Plaza and booth the first one was in August. We are going to have two more by the end of the fiscal year. We're going to try and do it quarterly. But we've only seen success with these events so far. I mean, we're not promoting jobs at the forefront. We're just letting the community know we're the County of Hawaii, we're here in the community, this is what we do. And if you're interested, we also have jobs. And so, I was there both Friday/Saturday and all of our departments were busy throughout the day. People were just inquisitive. They just wanted to know what we're doing in the community. What we're all about. These departments did this was the second one, so the departments did some fun things. They had some trivia, they had some games. Water Department did some education on checking for leaky toilets. It's those kinds of things. It's not putting—shoving our job vacancies in their faces. It's just communicating, engaging with the community. And we're always well received. We were thinking, "Oh, there'll be shoppers but they're just going to ignore us" but they actually stopped by. A lot of our departments, including ours, gave out free stuff. We gave out folders and pens—and everybody likes that kind of stuff. So, we're going to continue that. The next phase is trying to identify a Kona location. Kona's a little bit more challenging. They don't have that kind of enclosed shopping space where we can capture the high foot traffic. So, we are going to look into Kona Commons is the closest—where a lot of the local community interacts. Page 20