2025-08-26 Merit Appeal Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board August 26, 2025 CHR. CABANAS: Good morning, Jenny. MS. SAKAMOTO: My name is Jenny Sakamoto, I’m the HR Manager in charge of Personnel and Organizational Development, which is kind of, like, the training division but we recently expanded to do a variety of other programs. So, I’ll talk a little bit more about that but just to give you, just a little bit about me. I’ve been th with the County for—I’m finishing up my 18 year, and I’ve had various roles within HR. I’ve worked in the operating department before I came to HR. I was a Classification and Pay Manager before settling in on training. So, kind of, jack-of-all-trades, master of none—kind of a thing. But I really felt like this is where I belong. I really feel like we have to help our employees understand our processes and just become better employees altogether—and we do it a lot through our supervisory training programs. Okay, so I just wanted to reintroduce my staff. So, we have Nawai Higa, she’s our Employee Development Assistant; and then Junko Calma, who’s our Professional Trainee. And so, Junko’s learning to eventually take over some of my regular trainings, so that I can expand some of the other programs that I’m working on—and Nawai just helps me all around with all of our department trainings—not just for our section, but for some of the other managers like our Equal Opportunity section and so forth. So, they’ve both been with us for about a year-and-a-half—both—so they’re both relatively new to the County. So, they are still, kind of learning—but they pick up really quickly. So, I’m very excited because this used to be a division of one, so I used to do everything. So, now that we have help, we can actually provide more training opportunities for our employees. So, Gabe remembers when we were working together—training was just, kind of, a one man show. So, just to give you some background on just some of the programs we do. We do do a lot of regular trainings that we always offer, and we provide most of the trainings in-house, which means we develop it, and we present it to our staff—that includes New Hire Orientation; we do Customer Service; I run a whole Supervisory Training Program that’s made up of about nine classes, where they have to take so many classes in order to get certified, and that gives—takes them from vacancy through termination. We also recently started up an Employee Engagement and Retention Program for supervisors. And that’s to help, kind of, go more in-depth into being a better supervisor, creating a safe and healthy workplace for all of our employees to grow and thrive. And, hopefully, that will create more engagement and interest on behalf of the employee to then, eventually, have better retention, right—‘cause we want to keep our employees throughout their career in government. So, that’s what that employee—I mean, that program is supposed to help facilitate. Page 5