2014-10-15 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

Home

Merit Board of Appeals October 15, 2014 Ms. Toriano stated she thinks that through this process, the communication and the concerns of the departments would lessen because we're now integrated as one—from our office to the user department. This is a specific goal that has been a work -in -progress for a number of months. Chair Kuewa stated that this would be at least one question of this survey concerning conflicting opinions by different specialists in the HR office. Ms. Toriano said that this was why standardization was important. Although they're developing a relationship with their assigned departments and have rotations, it's become necessary to constantly look at the individuals assigned to certain departments because of their different levels of knowledge, skill, and ability. We cannot have someone in cross -training and taking on the same amount of workload as other people who have been doing transactions. Chair Kuewa proposed that another performance category be added to the evaluation, which is "customer service," and would like to open this proposal for discussion. There's a whole number of goals that would fall into that category. He feels for every manager or supervisor there should always be a customer service element. This category can be filled very easily with different goals, especially based on survey results for ongoing actions. Mr. Nahuina added, being a teacher, he knows human resources training and education is another component, and how large a role it is. He asked Ms. Toriano whether she receives requests from the departments to provide that or if she's planning for it. This is something that we may need to make more visible and apparent. Ms. Toriano shared that when it comes to training, we're not very good. There'll see peaks and valleys as it depends upon the event which drives us to that peak. Instead of having consistent and on-going training, we have one person assigned to training to serve the entire County. This person cannot be everything for all the job classes for the departments. One of the courses, based on the feedback from departments, is for supervisory skill training, which there's a course for it. What are mandatory that we must do in order to be in compliance are the things that are tackled. What we're finding and we haven't a solution—after we offer the trainings—we're not seeing the attendance. Ms. Ota questioned whether the supervisory training was mandatory. Ms. Toriano replied that some of the mandatory trainings relate to drug, violence, reasonable suspicion—but when talking about supervisory skills, which everyone Page 11