Oh, they are HR rules.

Yeah.

Oh, no, she's pleased.

Kelly's in my county model.

Okay.

Geez.

Okay.

So we'll get started.

All right.

Welcome everybody to the Ramsey County Board Workshop.

Uh today's workshop will be a presentation on the human resources department transformation.

A look back and a look forward.

A courtesy reminder that this board workshop is recorded and it is live submitted on a Zoom webinar.

There will be no votes taken during this workshop.

Let's start with introduction of commissioners and presenters around the table and then the rest of the room.

I will start with me, uh Commissioner Tara Jevinsing, District One.

Hello, Mary Joe McGuire, Commissioner District Two.

Garrison McMurtry, Commissioner District Three.

Patience Ferguson, Chief HR Officer.

Michael Fisher from Fisher Consulting.

Oh.

Miranda Harrison, Deputy Director.

Division Director of Labor Relations.

Kristen Schultz, HR Deputy Director of Total Rewards.

Veronica Jackson, briefing health faculty administrator.

Andrew Kentony, HR identification.

Or is it my sorry or the development supervisor?

President Monthly is an accommodations manager.

Community services asset.

Excellent.

Today's workshop will provide an overview and status update of the Ramsey County Human Resources Department.

We will hear about where the department has been, what has been learned in the first eight months and a review of the HR roadmap of priorities.

I will now hand it off to our presenters to kick off the bookshelf.

Thank you very much, Commissioner Jefferson.

My name is Patrice Ferguson, and I just want to say it is a delight to have an opportunity to share what we've been doing in the HR function and to have some conversation.

And so what I'd like to do first of all is just talk a little bit about.

And coming back to Ramsey County, which is one of the most diverse counties in the state of Minnesota, and the innovation that has really happened in this county, and the belief and the power of community was what really drew me here.

I was excited to get back to the community groups and to use my skills and human resources to be that bridge between the community, the residents, and the wonderful employees, over 4,000 employees that we have here in Ramsey County.

And so I'm thankful.

I consider it an honor.

I consider it a privilege to be here.

And I'm hoping that what I do and what my team does really does add value to the residents, to the people in this organization, to the community and to the organizations and the wonderful employees that we serve.

I'd like to now just talk a little bit about what my impressions have been over the past several months as I've been here.

What has excited me was not only just the opportunity to be re-engaged in an organization whose values really embody the values that I believe and going to do and aspire to do every day.

What is really exciting me was the technology.

I remember the interview that I had when I heard that the county had committed to work day, and that excited me because I've been working in organizations where either they were in the process of looking at their technology or they were invited, they were using that technology.

And to hear that Ramsey County had made a dedicated commitment to that showed me that they were forward thinking, that they wanted efficiency and they wanted to move this organization to another level.

The other part that excited me was that there was a learning management system.

Very few public sector employers have a learning management system that allows us to be much more agile, create opportunities to develop learning in a different way.

And given the many, many buildings and the many different ways that Ramsey County works, to know that the county had developed and had made a commitment to a learning management system as a person who believes in learning and development, that just really spoke to my heart.

What surprised me, and this may sound very different as a surprise, but to know that you had taken the transaction and centralized it was a surprise.

When I worked at the city of Minneapolis, which has comparable numbers of employees, we struggled for years to try to get our transaction piece centralized because there was no controls in place and there wasn't a consistent way of trying to get those transactions.

And knowing that the Ramsey County had made that commitment to really centralize that transaction piece spoke to the reasons, one of the reasons why I came here.

And it's really going to be important as we move toward workday.

So we are doing some process improvements, which you'll hear a little bit about later.

But to know that you're one of the few organizations within the state that is centralized that function, that took a great deal of effort, a lot of commitment, and a lot of support.

Having said all that, what concerned me as I peeled back the layers, if you will, was the turnover in leadership and human resources, which I'm not saying anything that nobody, no, none of you and I know about.

It didn't scare me, but it was very surprising.

And so we're going to talk a little bit about that later.

But but one of the reasons why that when I think about the, I'm going to now talk a little bit about that, that because that leads into the look back of the HR function.