2025-11-21 Merit Appeal Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board November 21, 2025 I mean, I attended the original—the first set of meetings. I went down and attended one of the sessions at Shultz Siding—the Base Yard. So, that’s a room where everybody’s watching it on a monitor. We didn’t have workstations set-up for people to enter, ‘cause there really wasn’t anything for them to enter in that course. But I was happy to attend that session and be able to answer questions because, certainly, once you start talking about something—then there’s more and more questions. So, it’ll be interesting to attend the trainings beginning next week and, again, hear what the questions are. And we have regular meetings between HR and Finance and the software company to regularly evaluate where we’re at and what we may need to change or do differently, so that we can answer questions and just make sure that we’re getting everyone’s feedback—and then, getting responses to them. So, it’s a work-in-progress. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, sounds good. Any other questions? Niel, go ahead. MR. THOMAS: I have an unrelated question. In a couple places in the reports there’s mention of this Myers-Briggs training—that there was, apparently, a lunch-n-learn and there was a request pending for further training by Fire Dispatchers. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that’s done? Do we hire consultants or what? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, actually, Jennifer Sakamoto in our Personnel and Organizational Development Division—she became certified to administer the Myers-Briggs, which is a personality inventory. And so, that training is focused, basically, on teams—helping—the personality inventory helps provide insight into, for example—“Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Are you more sensing or feeling”—or thinking or feeling—I’m sorry, I’m forgetting what each of the letters actually is. But the way that she uses it is you take the inventory yourself and she provides you with a confidential report of your results. And the first part of the training is to explain what that means, so the people can see if they actually feel that that is them, or if they would change some of their answers and feel like, “No, I’m more feeling than thinking”—et cetera. The second half of the training that she provides is group exercises where she breaks down the groups based on how you answered those questions. And then, you answer a set of questions and look at the differences between, say, how an extrovert would see a situation versus an introvert. And so, it’s focused on helping you to understand yourself and gain awareness about other people that you work with, with the goal of, hopefully, improving communication and as a further effort in improving the teamwork. My team did it in HR—we did the first training session in August and then we followed up with the second part of the training in October—and my staff really enjoyed it. It was really insightful, and they enjoyed it—they enjoyed seeing how their results came out but then, also understanding their co-workers, and learning how their communication style may be impacted or the way that we perceive deadlines. There are those of us that really appreciate deadlines and, if Page 15