2014-10-15 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Board of Appeals October 15, 2014 Ms. Toriano stated that the goals were established based on collaboration with the division heads of the HR Department and, of course, the Merit Appeals Board. There are a lot of items that we'd like to see done. As an example, survey question Number 8 states, "How knowledgeable is Human Resources about your department goals?" (SEE. PREVIOUS ATT. Q. When 1 compared the ratings (2011- 2012 and 2013-2014), I'm not thrilled at the result as it looks like we're moving in the wrong direction. How are we going to address this? We have quarterly expectations of our recruitment, classification, and transactions that are going out into the field to visit the worksites and to learn more about the requirements of the positions. Mr. Nahuina mentioned that when he was looking at the comments, about one- fourth of them talked about understanding communication—they would like to see HR talk with them and understand what they're going through. He's glad that she's acknowledging and addressing that issue. Ms. Toriano commented that along that line, there were discrepancies between what one employee would say versus another employee would say in another section. Standardization was put into place and we're hoping to see a more favorable response. Ms. Toriano stated that another goal is updating the Department's Rules, which is still a work -in -progress. Chair Kuewa stated that those were the things that he looked at. From his point of view, he considered them to be under the "communications, campaign, or improvement categories" where she's doing things to improve in all of those areas for communicating with the departments. Mr. Nahuina stated that under "comments" he noticed the issue of time where timeliness was brought up a number of times. He understands that the process takes time, but was there anything that HR was doing to address that part— teamwork, timeliness, streamlining—to understand their needs. Ms. Toriano said that she believes that this may have been predicated on a process change made to the hiring and recruiting where we have a County -wide policy that sets one process for all departments. It does involve more steps and oversight of leadership, which does take more time. We also have oversight at each step in the recruitment process—how we're going to fill the position and who are we recommending for hire. This process was requested by our leadership and it was developed to meet that need. Page 8