2025-06-24 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2025 The Health and Safety Division—Doug McCormick went to the training to learn how to become a Certified—it’s to basically, train the trainer for a CDL trainer—but it’s under new regulations, which the State hasn’t adopted yet. So, he’ll be ready for that when we adopt these new regulations. But one of the things that he noticed while he was on campus at this university was they had a lot of postings about general mental health resources for students. And he was thinking about it and said he’d like to see something like that posted here within the County. We have had—I think that there’s just more general anxiety whether—or so it could be people are a little bit more anxious. It seems like people are feeling the effects of, maybe, financial issues. There just seems to be a need for people to be reminded of resources. So, Doug actually came up with this flyer, which I can pass around to you folks. But, basically, something that we can post on our bulletin boards—and areas we’ve asked for it to be posted in high traffic areas that our employees visit—just so that they’re reminded of resources available to them. (SEE ATT. A.) So, I was really happy to see Doug take that initiative and bring that back—and happy to be able to find different ways to remind our employees of available benefits. Jenny and I, in our—Jenny is the Manager in our Personnel and Organizational Development Division. She and I had a meeting with the Deputy Director of the Planning Department because they did an employee survey—an internal survey. And one of the areas that the survey identified for improvement was wanting more information about County benefits. And we thought that was really interesting feedback because we’re, kind of going—“Okay, well, yeah, we inform people of the benefits”—but it reminded us of the need to be reminding our employees of what benefits are out there. And so, we’re going to look to start a new initiative—maybe do it, kind of like, a brown bag lunch sessions on a periodic basis to really go over our employee benefits and make sure that people are aware of what’s out there—but, also, go over the work that our various County agencies do. I mean, people may not be aware of all of the services that, say, the Office of Aging provides. And that wouldn’t necessarily be an employee—a direct employee benefit—but we have family that we may not be aware that a resource exists. And so, wanting to provide different information and get those—get information about those benefits out there and really help foster this idea of, like, a County community. Michelle Simmons and I went to a “talent training” in Waimea. And one of the speakers, her feedback was that employee benefits that people are looking for in the workforce, aren’t necessarily all about just health insurance and wages. It’s getting other benefits from your employer. So, she gave the example of maybe you teach people how to apply for a mortgage or—so tangible, wholistic life skills—as opposed to just focus on, like, benefits—like, retirement and things like that. Page 11