2015-01-28 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Board of Appeals January 28, 2015 They did an inventory of as many human resource program -related definitions as they could come up with that could apply to more than one functional area, and compiled a list. They evaluated what they thought was the best practical definition was for each one, then incorporated all of those standard definitions into an actual stand-alone policy, so that it could be used throughout the County for whatever application is needed in human resource management. The foundation of any policy is the definitions and the terms used, which is helpful to our office when various divisions work on a policy. So we now have, for lack of a better term, a database to pull from so everything will be consistent moving forward. While it may appear simplistic, it's actually not. It's never been like this before. The two major policies that were affected by their Rule change were the "internal complaint procedure" and the "separation from service." Over the past year, they developed in consultation with a variety of people—whether it be within our office or with the Office of the Corporation Counsel or the unions—and received feedback and made some adjustments and worked with them on it. They are in the process of finalizing this process, to be effective on March 2—the first working day in March. The second policy was the "separation from service." The County never had this policy before. It's a new policy but not a new concept. The State has a comparable policy but what it does, it centralizes and brings together all the different types of separations that are out there into one document that can be referenced. Within the County, we have various forms of separation—we had a rule on resignations, layoff procedures—there were things all over the place. What we did was brought them all into one document. So now we adjusted the Rules to require that procedures on resignation exist there rather than in the Rules themselves. We thought from a customer service standpoint that this was probably the best way to do it. We place ourselves in operation— you'd want to go to one place, so that we could reference the appropriate material dealing with a human resource action. In terms of any policy calls, there was nothing dramatically different. The most notable is that we're better organized where all of these actions exist in one policy. Page 13