HARTFORD, Conn. — Gov. Ned Lamont said his administration is proud of the work they have done on streamlining the functions of human resources in state government in order to make them more efficient.
"Improvements the state has made so far include the elimination of backlogs, the launch of LinkedIn Learning, and the digitization of over a million pages of paper," officials said in a statement.
The governor said centralizing the state’s human resources team during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic allowed state agencies to work together more quickly.
“This process is a perfect example of the mantra that we can accomplish more when we work together, and that’s the culture my administration has tried to promote as a principle of good government,” Lamont said. “From digitizing hundreds of thousands of pages of files, to eliminating backlogs, to building new teams with specialized skills, this is a modern HR effort that supports each and every one of our dedicated state employees and an environment that gets work done.”
Lamont pointed to the following:
- Launched LinkedIn Learning to help state employees address workplace and societal issues, state mandatory topics, business, technical, and skills development;
- Eliminated the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) backlog of 500 cases;
- Eliminated the military leave backlog of 30 cases;
- Digitized over 100,000 paper files, totaling over 1 million pages (most notably in workers compensation and FMLA programs);
- Processed over 700 retirement applications with higher rates of accuracy than in the past, eliminating the need to re-work service calculations; and
- Built specialized teams to work across state government in a consistent and more efficient manner, thereby relieving on-site human resources offices of service delivery workload and enabling them to better support their respective agencies during the pandemic.
HR teams can balance work across a larger pool of individuals, rather than in smaller groups of staff at agencies, and ensure that policies across state agencies are consistent.
"This update in structure has provided the state an opportunity to promote staff and hire new employees with a fresh perspective. The HR and labor relations teams started this process with roughly 350 staff, anticipating that by the 2022 retirement wave they would lose up to about 140 individuals. Centralization has helped support a plan to hire roughly 70 new staff, arriving and building a team of around 280 individuals who can work more collaboratively and efficiently," said the statement.
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