Governor Lamont Supplies Replace on Streamlining of State’s Human Assets Operations, Highlights Help Of Pandemic Response

Governor Ned Lamont yesterday announced a status update to the Executive Ordinance he signed in 2019, instructing state agencies to streamline their human resources operations in order to reduce bureaucracy and improve efficiency, with the aim of increasing the ability of residents to interact with the Improve state. all while saving tax money. The improvements the state has made so far include removing backlogs, introducing LinkedIn Learning, and digitizing over a million pages of paper.

The governor said an added benefit of centralizing the state personnel team during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been the ability of state agencies to work together more quickly.

“This process is a perfect example of the mantra that we can achieve together, and that is the culture my government has tried to promote as a principle of good government.” Governor Lamont said. “From digitizing hundreds of thousands of pages of files to cleaning up residue to building new teams with special skills, this is modern human resources work that supports each and every one of our dedicated government employees and an environment in which the work is done.”

As part of this initiative, the state has achieved a number of specific milestones, including:

• Introducing LinkedIn Learning to help government employees address issues in the workplace and in society, identify mandatory topics, conduct business, technical and skills development;
• Eliminate the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) backlog of 500 cases;
• Removal of 30 military vacation backlogs;
• Digitized over 100,000 paper files with a total of over 1 million pages (especially in employee compensation and FMLA programs);
• Processed over 700 retirement applications with greater accuracy than in the past, eliminating the need for post-processing calculations; and
• Building specialized teams to work consistently and more efficiently across the state government, relieving the local HR offices and providing better support to their respective authorities during the pandemic.

This centralization process has allowed the HR team to distribute work among a larger pool of individuals rather than smaller groups of agency employees, and to ensure that guidelines are consistent across government agencies.

This update of the structure has given the state the opportunity to promote employees and hire new employees with a new perspective. The HR and Industrial Relations teams started this process with around 350 employees and assumed they would lose up to 140 people by the 2022 retirement wave. Centralization has helped support a plan to hire around 70 new employees and build a team of around 280 people who can work more collaboratively and efficiently.

“This initiative is an excellent example of the opportunities we have in the state government to improve the quality of our services, to use technologies that help us to be more efficient, to create new training and career opportunities for our employees and at the same time Cut costs. ” Josh Geballe, commissioner for the Department of Administrative Services and chief operating officer for the state, said. “Our HR team has been a critical part of the pandemic response and has ensured that agencies can work together quickly to achieve common goals and address new challenges.”

“The centralization of industrial relations has enhanced our ability to serve the people of this state more efficiently and has focused our efforts.” Melissa McCaw, Secretary for Policy and Management, said. “Instead of fragmenting the people, expertise and resources in each government agency, we can now maximize productivity by breaking down silos and leveraging specialization. We are already incredibly pleased with what we have achieved and with additional time and training we will continue to improve and modernize the Connecticut state government to meet the needs of today and tomorrow. “

“One of the values ​​of Governor Lamont’s administration was intergovernmental cooperation.” Vannessa Dorantes, Commissioner of the Department for Children and Families, said. “Not only does this result in more efficient government, but more importantly, better quality of service for our valued consumers – the citizens of Connecticut. The centralization of staff support is an example of how successful this vision has been and can be used as a template for future endeavors. “

“These efforts have resulted in a team that is able to balance the work with a larger pool of talent rather than forcing agencies to do a significant amount of human resource work with a small group of people and other agencies with staff who would take over this on more ” Nick Hermes, the state’s hiring manager, said. “I would like to thank the governor for his support and the entire HR team who worked tirelessly to ensure that we move smoothly into a central organization while also helping the agencies respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. We couldn’t ask for a better team. “