HR Council talks employee skill-building and wellness

By Sarah Einselen

Inquirer Reporter

The county HR Coun­cil met for the final time this year at Ohio Mutual Insur­ance Group in Bucyrus to dis­cuss what was being done in the par­tic­i­pat­ing com­pa­nies to encour­age skill-building and edu­ca­tional devel­op­ment among its employ­ees. The coun­cil also dis­cussed how they were encour­ag­ing employ­ees to live more healthy lifestyles.

Most of the human resources rep­re­sen­ta­tives in atten­dance said their com­pa­nies used a com­bi­na­tion of indi­vid­ual and group on-the-job train­ing, writ­ten man­u­als and webinars/video con­fer­ences. Soft­ware providers and state busi­ness orga­ni­za­tions were the main webi­nar sources that the HR rep­re­sen­ta­tives noted, though those in larger cor­po­ra­tions were able to access train­ing webi­nars through their cor­po­rate offices. One woman men­tioned that the com­pany where she’d pre­vi­ously worked encour­aged its employ­ees to join Toast­mas­ters, too.

Some of the com­pa­nies also coor­di­nate with NC State Col­lege and Pio­neer Career and Tech­ni­cal Cen­ter to hire new peo­ple already trained on the equip­ment or com­puter sys­tems in question.

A hur­dle faced in some on-the-job train­ing expe­ri­ences was that long­time employ­ees knew their job so well, it was dif­fi­cult for them to bring it back down to a beginner’s level and explain every sin­gle step included in a task. Juanita Carter of Carter Machine and Ruth Karl of Larry M Karl Truck­ing had both expe­ri­enced this. Karl said she was in the habit of observ­ing train­ing ses­sions in order to be able to get a feel for the jobs being taught and then to point out steps or tips that she’d seen in pre­vi­ous train­ing ses­sions but were missed this time around.

Some com­pa­nies offered col­lege tuition assis­tance in addi­tion to other oppor­tu­ni­ties for train­ing, but not all. In some com­pa­nies it has been dif­fi­cult to retain employ­ees for the required dura­tion after they had availed them­selves of the tuition assis­tance. At least one com­pany dis­con­tin­ued offer­ing tuition assis­tance because of such abuse of the offering.

Mike Hor­vath, OMIG vice pres­i­dent of human resources, noted that his com­pany used a com­bi­na­tion of on-the-job tech­ni­cal train­ing, tuition assis­tance and inter­nal lead­er­ship devel­op­ment to train new employ­ees, since most peo­ple hired didn’t plan on a career in insur­ance. “One of our val­ues state­ments is ‘keep your skills cur­rent’,” he said, so the com­pany offers in-house or online classes teach­ing lead­er­ship skills like con­flict res­o­lu­tion and inter­per­sonal skills.

After dis­cussing employee edu­ca­tional devel­op­ment, the coun­cil turned to the ques­tion of how to encour­age well­ness and healthy lifestyles. Ruth Vogel of C.E. White in New Wash­ing­ton said that com­pany worked with its insur­ance provider, Anthem, to coor­di­nate well­ness chal­lenges and health fairs. The cur­rent chal­lenge is to walk for a total of sixty hours over three months and the next one is to main­tain one’s cur­rent weight over the holidays.

Each activ­ity is ori­ented toward par­tic­i­pa­tion, not judg­ing the health­i­ness of anyone’s lifestyle, and par­tic­i­pa­tion has been “phe­nom­e­nal,” Vogel said. Employee par­tic­i­pa­tion at the most recent health fair reached 75 per­cent and the activ­i­ties have helped keep the insur­ance rates from increas­ing. Vogel said some employ­ees that par­tic­i­pate already live healthy lifestyles but the activ­i­ties were encour­ag­ing oth­ers to alter their habits.

Cheryl Coon of Buck­eye Pumps reported that BP had an in-house exer­cise room open for use by any employee and had removed its snack machines. Ruth Karl said the veg­gie tray pro­vided to the Karl truck­ers at the end of the dri­ving day had encour­aged the dri­vers to snack on healthy food rather than stop by a fast-food place.

The HR Coun­cil will take a break over the hol­i­days and resume meet­ing in Jan­u­ary. For infor­ma­tion about the Coun­cil con­tact Angela Neef, Job­sPlus coor­di­na­tor, at (419) 563‑1568.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Nov 1 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.