 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name is Adam Payne, County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Roger Distruty. And as you know, once a month we strive to bring a different program or service to your attention that we're proud of and that we have excellent county employees working to implement. And this month, we have our HR director with us, Miss Jean Gallimore. Welcome. Thank you, good to be here. You know, the honeymoon period is over for Jean. She was just sharing with Roger and I off the air, this is your third program. And I think you're, has it been two years now with Sheboygan County? Yeah. So some of you probably have had the pleasure to meet Jean. And I know she's from this area or at least has lived here for quite some time. Why don't we start with that? Share a little bit about yourself and your family. Great. Yes, I'm actually from Sheboygan. So all my life I spent a couple years away during college years and came back as I have a large family, family of 10. So siblings are across the country now. My parents and their families grew up in the Marshfield area. So all kind of Wisconsin, Wisconsinites, but settled in Sheboygan with my husband's family. We have three boys, two adults, and one that is on his way to becoming a young fine man. They're leaving the nest. They are, they are. Yeah, which I can relate to. Well, if you haven't met a Gallimore, you haven't been out. You need to meet this family. We're so tickled to have Jean with us. Before this, she was working with what? Blue Harbor, when that started and helped kick things off there, right? We did. We opened the resort. They're a family of the Great Wolf Resorts, or we're at the time. So I spent eight years as an HR director and then prior to that, about 17 years with Wells Fargo in the human resources management role. Yeah, well, it's been remarkable the last year, all the improvements that you and your team have made. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but please set the stage for our viewers a little bit. What are the primary roles and responsibilities of an HR human resources department? Right, you bet. Primarily, I would start with really the recruitment and then certainly retention of our employees. As our employees typically, as any organization say, they are our number one asset, recruitment and retention is key. Along with that would become our compensation, our pay plans, and our benefits for our employees. So very important pieces. We also work very closely with our employees along the lines of wellness, safety, diversity type initiatives, certainly workers' compensation, affirmative action and that type. So that kind of sums up the big picture. Very, very high end summary, because a lot going on you're supporting about 825 employees throughout the organization. How many employees in HR and what is your department annual budget? Right, we currently have four full-time employees and two part-time employees in human resources. Our current annual budget is just over 500,000, about 512,000. But there again, working with an organization with about 825 employees, $127 million operating budget, a lot going on to support these employees, a lot of change with employees. Largely born by the state level. How many employees, for example, do we have that are non-barking versus under a contract? We currently have about 820 employees. Of that 820, just over 200, about 210 are within contracts. So we have about 150 within our Rocky Knoll contract and then about just over 50 within our Sheriff's Department, the deputies and detectives. And of those employees, how many do you like and how many don't you know? Like all of them. They're all wonderful. They are, we've got a great team. You started right on the onset, saying that what Roger and I and certainly our organization firmly believes in any good company or business will tell you, your employees are your most valuable asset. We want to attract and retain excellent employees. And recently you grabbed the reins and we went through a countywide employee compensation study. Again, covered the entire county. Set the stage a little bit for that. What did we do and why? Right. So post act 10, a lot has changed. So culturally within the county and we'll talk about some of those changes as we continue to talk. We had a need to take a look at every five to seven years, typically every organization should take a look at their compensation plan. And to your point of that recruitment and retention of a talented workforce. We also had that need at the county. So we reached out to a consultant out of Minneapolis who this is what they do. They take a look at compensation plans and make sure of a couple of things. We wanted to take a look we currently had and still have in place this year, eight different compensation tables. So quite a challenge to manage that with the diversity of our group of employees. So the compensation study was to certainly take a look at how could we streamline the compensation tables. How do we ensure though that we continue to be able to retract and retain. So we really tasked the consultant with going out and comparing our salaries, our current conditions to really the market conditions with both private and public sector data. So we tasked them with making sure that we can be competitive as an employer within those salary tables. We also took a look at our current job descriptions to make sure that they were up to speed because those can tend to be outdated. So we tasked our employee group to really work with their managers and their supervisors to ensure current data. So we could then take the job descriptions and appropriately market price to similar jobs in those public and private sectors. So streamlined eight or nine different salary schedules which was again very challenging to administer and different variables across the board. I recall updating our position descriptions such that we had about 200 different job titles and now it's closer to 100. You mentioned that we addressed some of the have and have nots and I know longevity was a longstanding benefit or compensation approach in the county and as time has gone on, some employees were receiving it, some weren't. What happened with that? So the longevity discussion is certainly a sensitive discussion for the county and the county leadership and we recognize that. So a group of really just committee after committee continued to meet to discuss the sensitivity. We engaged employees, we engaged management team on the input and as an end result, we worked with Gallagher, the compensation study and said, you know what? What are other organizations doing? What are other companies doing? So a lot of survey information was collected along with that engagement of those employees and really as an end result, the thought was to roll longevity into the employees' base pay of those employees who currently had received longevity. So they didn't lose it. They did not lose. Which happened in some other counties. Correct, there was a number of. In fact, we were one of few that decided to roll longevity in. Okay, so they didn't lose that compensation. Now we have more of a playing field where we don't have the have and have nots and another big change that came out of the compensation study as you know and Roger knows is rather than paying everyone the same regardless of their ability, regardless of their performance, everyone getting the same across the board increase. Now we have a pay for performance model. How does that work? What's that mean? Right, so our current plan, how it compares currently to where we'll move to this paper performances, we currently have steps that automatically would happen if you were in a position for example for six months or 12 months or 18 months depending on that former bargaining contract. And so performance wasn't necessarily reviewed on a consistent basis for all those positions in those departments. As we look, we also currently have a merit pay program. So a merit pay program takes a little bit of a closer look at how does that performance tie in to what that would qualify potentially for that employee to have a salary increase. So those plans today are in place. The paper performance came again as a result of the compensation study and the consultant saying this is kind of where we're moving. So really the paper performance will take effect as of January 1st. What that entails is the study again, the recommendation was to take a look at eliminating the steps processes within the compensation plan and really that merit piece and the across the board increases, those automatics. It we will move to as of January 16th with the exception of the two collective bargaining units to complete paper performance, which means each employee will be held to minimum standards of qualifications and expectations for positions. It allows us then to also really award and recognize those outstanding performers. So it will be very much for the last couple of years we've tied into performance management training. We've really tweaked our performance evaluation tool itself to make it user friendly. We've engaged our management team in on that to say what do you like, what don't you like, what's working. So they've had a taste of this for a couple of years and now it's time to fully apply that tool come January. So everyone will receive a performance review that will be tied to that potential merit increase. Which isn't unusual in the private sector and more and more public sector organizations are going to. What I like about it, and Jean of course we've been working on this for the past year but what I like about it is rather than every employee receiving an across the board increase, usually CPI is what the board's been doing. So right around 1.2%, 1.5% increase, which is a modest increase, but everyone got the same. And we'd have employees say, well, I'm concerned about going to pay for performance. We should maybe keep the status quo and of course responded to that was do you really want to continue to be paid the same increase as the least productive co-worker that you have? Not necessarily someone that's being let go because they're not doing the job but just barely doing enough and they're getting the same increase as someone who's just an outstanding performer. What does that do to drive innovation and everyone raising the bar and doing more? So with pay for performance, yes, everyone's got to meet minimum expectations as you have in the past, but now if you meet those minimum expectations you receive an increase of some level of the board will support and those outstanding performers can be rewarded and actually receive more. And I like that that we can reward our best and the brightest. I think that's how you keep good people working for you. Last question and I'll turn it over to the chairman. The process itself, how did we make sure that we engaged our employees not only during the development of the compensation study and gathering information, but also informing them of the recommendations of the consultant, how were they engaged? Okay, really the process started over a year ago and what we did initially is we brought the consultant on to town and we invited our key management team and then those employees that could afford to kind of get away to those meetings and I think it was important initially in the county made the right first move there to invite employees in to say this is what a compensation study is. This will be our approach. This is our approximate timeframe so that knowledge at the front end was key. Following that it was truly a process where we collected all the job descriptions. The management team was to go to those employees, engage the employees on the actual job that they're doing to ensure that we capture the main functions and responsibilities of that position. Once that was complete through last summer the consultant then reviewed each job description and certainly said there's similar jobs so we created some job families within so we went from those 200 titles to about 100 but then also from there checked in with our department head team several times throughout the late last year to say are we on task, here are the job descriptions, are you sure we've captured everything? And here during that time also did that market pricing piece of the project so they went out and studied other counties in private sectors of like size and really compared them and contrasted where our salary ranges were at. So once again after that piece of the project was done we engaged our key leaders to say do you think we're on target, here's the preliminary data. That being said throughout that time as well we continued to communicate with our all employee newsletter to employees to update them throughout periodically through the project so they weren't out there hanging and again the project took a little longer but we feel good about that from the standpoint of we allowed our management team to take a deeper dive and make sure that there was quality information and input in this survey. I'd rather take more time and do it right. That's exactly right. Then rush it through and that's exactly what you did. And that's what we did and then it really brought us to earlier this year Adam where everything came together, the job descriptions, the classifications, the pay grades, the compensation tables themselves. From there again we introduced them that to the Human Resources Committee, the Finance Committees, we had the consultant come in once again and meet with all employees and I think we had five or six sessions for all employees to come and say, you know what, here's what we told you we did, here's actually the end result. Here are the recommendations and I think most importantly the study itself provided recommendations. We as a county were able then to say do these recommendations make sense? Are they the right fit for Sheboydon County? So from there we had very good turnout at those meetings and very good conversations at those meetings. The employees felt engaged and that went well. From there we did present to the county board. So the study required full county board approval and the study was approved in June of this year. So we're now at the process that comes as full circle a year later of the studies effective eight will be January 16th of 16. So we're now in the process of the study is over, we're implementing, it will be a big project for the HR and payroll team to put together. And then we will also introduce an interesting aspect which is very different than the private sector typically what they would do but we're offering an appeals process to our employee group which allows them to sit with their management team, take a look at what was that end result, where does my job fall and did we capture and how do I think that that fits what I'm doing and really that helps us in the buy-in process. And if the consultant missed something if a position description wasn't updated appropriately if the department had missed something because they're the ones who submitted those it gives us a chance to get it right before implementation January 1st. Provides that opportunity. So that'll be over the next three months and then we'll have full implementation and move right into like we said the paper performance as of January. Well my compliments to you and your team huge accomplishment for the county. Very important to us again to be able to recruit and retain good staff and big picture though there were significant changes with rolling in the longevity, the pay for performance. When you boil it all down it really didn't have a great impact for employees today because no one lost income as a result of this no one's salaries were reduced as a result of this most of our positions were identified to be within the appropriate range or market though there were 32 employees I think that actually we'll see some nice increases because they needed to be moved up to the minimum of the range and in particular I feel good for those employees because now they're getting paid what they should be and I feel good for employees going forward because if they're exceeding expectations there's a little bit of a reward that can be provided that we haven't been able to do in the past. So nice work. That's right, thank you. Roger. Thank you Adam. And Jean let's talk about employee benefits and safety and wellness. And in particular safety we're always trying to improve the safety for all the different departments throughout the county but what in particular are you concentrating on? What's the hot topic this year? Okay, very good. I think we continue to put safety front of mind for our employees and we say that with so many I think our management team and our employees are tasked with so much every day but truly safety for our employees as well as any guests that enter our buildings is really very key. So that's a main focus. Really what we've done this last year Roger is we have for the last two years offered an annual safety training opportunity for all employees to attend. So this last year we focused on some fire safety. We focused on AED training. We focused on EAP which is our employee assistance program and a lot of people wouldn't really have that connectivity automatically in their minds about how does EAP connect to safety? But safety and wellness ties together about how we have that work and home life balance. So we trained a little bit on EAP and surprisingly and just really intriguing for me is a number of employees weren't really aware of what an impact EAP can be for our employee group and quite honestly we have seen the usage increase since that training. So tie that into that safety training and opportunity where all employees were in one room so let's get that in there. Let me just stop you for a second because I recently was just talking to a really valuable employee that works in one of our departments who reached out to me and maybe it was in part your department cluing them in but the employee if you're wondering what is this EAP? This employee was going through a divorce. It was very recent information. He was in shock and awe because he didn't see it coming. Had some other things going on in his personal life and I don't care who you are that can impact your focus at work. If things aren't good at home they're generally not real good at work and this employee called me just simply to say thank you and how much it meant to this individual that they had the opportunity to get that assistance. It made a world of difference to them and they also were very appreciative of the HR department and their managers for being empathetic and supportive during the few weeks or so that I think they were engaged. I don't know exactly but it touched me as well Jean because I thought wow here's a really, I mean this is an employee I knew had a lot of respect for and it helped them be successful and work through some of the issues they needed to. So glad to hear that that's something you're making sure all of our employees are aware of. Absolutely, so really to finish Roger you know the other major piece we added this year in safety training was self defense. We had a lot of employees say this is important to us. We're walking out perhaps in a dark parking lot or maybe not real well lit whether that's while they're at work or while they're at home. We had that, again that work and home life balance. So let's provide them that training. Our Sheriff's Department was intrigued and became very engaged during this training so they actually conducted that section of the training and excellent feedback. So personal safety was a little more of a focus last year. 2015 our focus is we realize it's hard to continue to get everybody out of the workplace for training. So this year what we're gonna do is actually go to the workplace for training. Steve Steinert our emergency management director and our building services manager, Nate True will actually join myself. We are going out to each department, each facility and the focus of this training in late fall, early winter will be crisis management, emergency preparedness for each location. Each location has a little something to do. For example, if an active shooter were to come in or if there is a fire what departmentally and facility wise are we fully prepared? We say that we are. So we'll actually do some walkthrough exercises and again engage the employees. What would you do? Are you prepared? So safety remains key to continuous training. And each year we evaluate the employees benefits and it's a big part of our budget. What's the focus this year? Right. This year as we all know benefits continue to change and with all of the ACA the Florida Bill Care Act requirements that are involved we actually formed a formal strategic benefits committee and that was formed in late 2014 started to meet in 2015. That was met led actually by J. Scott our benefit consultant through AFG and we had a diverse group of employees from across the organization and a couple of county board supervisors that joined us. We met actually several times a month the first quarter of 2015. The goals were to make sure that the group was educated on our current benefits and then to discuss current trends whether those were internal trends meaning what's our employees health? How does that picture look? And no personal information shared. Just overall what should we be focusing on? What's good? What's maybe not so good? And then external trends as well. What are other organizations doing and what should Wayne County be doing? And primary focus certainly is dollars. How can we continue to provide very good benefits at a reasonable cost to both the employee and the taxpayer? So those meetings initially were quite intriguing. They continued then on to what we did this year as an employee benefit survey. So again, I really applied to Wayne County for engaging our employees several times in the last couple of years here since my arrival that we wanna hear from them. So we did a survey we had over 50% participation in that survey which is excellent results to say what do you feel about our current benefits? Health, dental, vision, life, so forth. The majority of our employees over 80% almost 90% in each of those categories employees are very pleased with the benefit package that the counties offers. But when I wanted to go out and say what else? What aren't we doing? So again, engaging. So we took that feedback that brings us to current a few weeks ago. The committee then recommended some potential changes for 2016 and then really strategically for 2017 and 2018. So the committee presented that to the Human Resources Committee and we've got some approvals of some minor changes for 2016 and we'll continue then to focus on more of a biometric health plan for 2017 and 18. So we'll continue to stay with our current provider for 2015 with some minor tweaks. And as I talked to different county board members from other counties, I believe we are very active about getting input from our employees. Some since Act 10 have sort of dictated what is done, but I think the employees appreciate the input and they look around to other counties and appreciate that in particular. And another point of interest to the employees is the wellness. And I know that they're included in the wellness package and the development of our in health clinic. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. I think, Roger, it all starts, I think from my perspective with that in health clinic, we are partnered with the Shaboyganary School District and the city of Shaboygan with our employees in that clinic effort. So I think that the main thrust of wellness is to continue to keep our health front of mind and the employees really drive that to make sure they're educated and again that they understand and they really drive their own wellness. So the in health clinic helps with that. A number of other things that we do, we certainly do our annual human resources, our annual health risk assessments through human resources and the in-care health clinic, which is kind of that reading once a year for us to go in at no cost to the employee. If they do that, their percentage to their health insurance is decreased. Again, it's us and employers saying it's important for us for you to stay as healthy as you can and be educated. So we'll do that. We currently have a wellness committee that meets quarterly and they discuss. And again, we're engaging employees. What are other organizations using? What else should we be doing for wellness initiatives? I think most recently what really is exciting for me is again, listening to our employees out of the employee benefits survey, we heard a lot about fitness centers and we heard a lot about how do we get healthy? Can we bring fitness centers into our county buildings? Can we perhaps like other organizations go out and sponsor some help and support with us joining fitness centers? So we did a survey once again, those counties around us, private and public sector employees, and I'm pleased to reiterate or announce that we rolled out a fitness center reimbursement program to our employees as of June 1st. So for those who are eligible for a benefit plan, let me qualify that. But it has been received very, very well. And the idea again is to get people more active. We're self-insured in terms of our employee benefits program and we're very concerned certainly about their health and wellness, but we're also concerned about keeping costs low. If we can have a healthier employee base, that should drive that cost down for us. Yeah, if I can, Roger, let's take a minute on that because Jean just did a great job summarizing the benefits to the employees and the good things we've done, but that wellness in health clinic not only is it good for the employee, it's good for the taxpayer. Just as these other programs are, because as you said at the end, if we can improve health, it reduces our costs significantly for the cost of health insurance and taking care of folks. Have you got a sense of what kind of savings or what kind of increases we've had in comparison to counties that haven't had in health clinic? We've not done a study quite like that. I can tell you that the trend continues to be that in health clinics are trending and increasing. Now what we can tell you is the more that we educate and have employees be consumers about their own health, that is definitely helping. So there's some of those soft costs that we can't necessarily put a figure to, but the more we can educate and bring these wellness programs into play and events such as the Cancer Walk, the Alzheimer's Walk, and Sheboyin County Healthy Fitness Day, we're getting people more savvy in terms of their own health. And I hit our cold with that question, but the reason it comes to mind is I just returned from a conference where one of the presentations, and it was a national conference, one of the presentations was Waukesha Counties in Health Clinic and the savings that it's providing not only for employees, but for taxpayers. Waukesha County put an end to health clinic in a year and a half ago following the lead of Sheboyin County. They followed our model and I think ours has been now in place, I lose track of time, maybe six or seven years. 2008, since 2008, yeah. So the speaker gave kudos to Sheboyin County for the model that they followed and did their, they only have a year and a half of data, but they're already showing the savings that it's providing for the employees and the taxpayer. So it's a win-win, which is great. Right, right. Well, thank you very much for all the work that you and your staff do to help our employees be better employees and in turn save taxpayer money. I'll turn it back to Adam. Thank you, Roger. We only have a minute left, so I thought I'd leave you with the question to focus on your staff a little bit. In my tenure, and I've been here 16 years now, I don't recall us having a stronger skill set, a stronger team in our HR department. Why don't you very quickly just recognize your staff because I know you have a number of new faces. We do, and thank you for that. We talked a little bit about myself, certainly just joining and adding value from the leadership standpoint. I also have Penny Alsner, who has been with the organization. I'll leave it at 30 plus years. So very valuable player. She's our analyst and really handles a lot of the work comp and reporting and compensation and so forth. We've got Julie Kinney who joined us about two years ago and Julie comes to us as a senior HR generalist with 20 plus years of experience, very well-rounded individual, glad to have her. We have Michelle Rainitz who joined us just a few months ago. Michelle has about 15 years of HR experience and she is a generalist with us as well. We have Courtney Ames who's been with us as an HR coordinator, a front desk, that big smile you see as you enter HR. And she's been with us just, I think seven or eight years, so it's very valuable. And just decided to go part time for us so we were able to add Alyssa Worth. Alyssa has just been with us for about a month and brings a couple of years experience with an HR degree. So very pleased to have the team that we have in place to help our employees here at Sheboyton County. Outstanding, outstanding. What a great note to add on. And if you have any questions about HR program services, anything you heard today, don't hesitate to contact Jean Gallimore, our member of her excellent team. And thank you so much for joining us this month. Next month we're gonna be focusing on our Health and Human Services Department, Tom Eggebrecht, our Health and Human Services Director, will be here and always does a nice job talking about their valuable program and services. So until then, thank you for joining us and have a great summer.