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HVBF Monthly Meeting - Human Resources
Roundtable Host: The Community College of Baltimore County at Hunt Valley Attending: Stephanie Anderson, Systems Alliance The Human Resources Roundtable met on Thursday, January 4 at 8:30 am at The Community College of Baltimore County at Hunt Valley. Christine Eichler introduced Elaine Forde and Pat LaForce for a report on the Race for the Cure scheduled for Sunday, October 14, 2007 at Hunt Valley. This is a major event for Hunt Valley and will bring many visitors into our area. The impact on the area is very low since it occurs between 6:00 and 11:00 am on Sunday morning. Traffic control will receive aggressive attention. The impact on our location as a community friendly venue is huge and positive. Volunteers and corporate sponsorships are needed. Please call Komen/Maryland at 410-938-8990 if you can help. Ed Fangman of TIMERcenter gave us an invitation to Lean Enterprise Workshops for the spring of 2007. These workshops will be held at CCBC in Hunt Valley and feature free two hour executive briefings on January 29 and March 5. These briefings will provide an insight to registration for the course. To register or for more information call the CCBC registration team at 410-869-0296. The balance of the roundtable was devoted to you and the issues that are most important to you. This was a true roundtable with no presenter other than those attending. There was no shortage of participation. Some of the issues discussed were: Recruiting remains of top concern. Steve Connolly, Baltimore County Workforce Development System and Cathy Harris, Maryland Job Services, offered the services of their offices to help with this continuing and soon to be growing challenge. The coming of BRAC will only exacerbate the difficulties in the coming years. The older population of the county is a resource not fully tapped. Another unique solution is to examine the advantages of employing the disabled. Assistance in getting to work may ease your recruiting efforts. Maryland offers to employers helpful programs to make transportation easier. Are you taking advantage of this tool? Offering telecommuting, if appropriate, is an attractive inducement as well as flex hours. Are you using your website to recruit and if you are, have you linked with the Job Opportunities link on the Home page of the HVBF website? Tom Strong, Venable, LLP, cautioned to carefully examine experienced applicants who may have non-compete agreements with former employees. Be sure to ask the right questions. Mentoring programs are a valuable tool. Those who are using them related the success of the programs. The value of rewards programs for retention received attention. Money is not a top reward for accomplishment. As a matter of fact, it ranks rather far down. Recognition is a top priority but how you accomplish this and importantly, how you measure it are challenges. Maury Weinstein of System Source has developed a presentation titled “Why Incentive Plans Do Not Work”. You may want to contact Maury at mweinste@syssrc.com for more information. I believe that we could have continued much longer but we ran out of time. This program will be repeated later in the year. The program steering committee is always interested in your feedback. Comments can be sent to me for forwarding. |