Washington County outlines HR transformation, class-and-comp study and Workday rollout

Washington County human resources leaders on Feb. 13 gave commissioners a status update on an ongoing HR transformation that includes organizational restructuring, a multi-year classification-and-compensation study, expanded recruiting and training programs, and a planned countywide migration to the Workday enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

HR reorganization, staffing and recruitment

Chief Human Resources Officer Lisa Takich told the board the HR department has focused on stabilizing leadership and shifting from generalist roles to more specialized positions. She reported HR is “fully staffed with the exception of one position in risk management” and that the county’s talent-acquisition team screened more than 12,000 applications last year. The county has added a deputy chief HR officer role to oversee senior HR business partners and has expanded its learning-and-development and talent-acquisition teams.

Job descriptions, class-and-comp study and pay strategy

HR staff said they have completed roughly 1,500 updated job descriptions as part of a countywide job-description initiative meant to document position-level duties and support ADA and light-duty decisions. "We're past the halfway point. We've the last count was we have 1,500 completed job descriptions," Lisa said during the meeting. The county has hired an external vendor, HR Answers, to conduct a classification-and-compensation study funded with one-time SIP dollars; staff said final study results are expected by the end of the fiscal year, with implementation planning to follow.

Workday ERP timeline and business-systems changes

Commissioners were told the county is replacing an older Oracle system with Workday. County staff reported the project is in system testing and configuration and confirmed a project target of December 2025 for the Workday go-live. "The target date for ... go live implementation of the system is December 2025," a county project lead said. HR staff described how Workday will shift some HR functions from manual, transactional tasks toward more automated, report-driven, data-informed work.

Training, benefits and wellness efforts

Learning-and-development staff reported high completion rates on mandatory compliance trainings: HIPAA training completions (about 670 employees), a Title II accessibility series with more than 790 completions so far, and regular anti-harassment sessions with near-100% completion rates. HR staff said a recent in-person wellness fair drew about 300 employees, an annual benefits fair drew about 200 employees, and the county awarded $15,000 in wellness grants to departments for items ranging from sun lamps to small appliances; HR said those grants touched roughly 1,780 employees countywide.

Risk management and claims trends

Lisa outlined changes to risk management practices that staff said have reduced claims severity: county data show a 9% reduction in claim rate and a 23% reduction in time-loss days compared with recent years, staff said. HR described new light-duty parameters, an online portal for ergonomic requests and a risk-committee structure that includes county council representation to review midrange claims before they escalate.

Next steps

HR staff said the classification-and-compensation study will be completed by the end of the fiscal year and that implementation decisions — including any budgetary implications for pay adjustments — will be addressed in the next budget cycle. The Workday project will continue through testing and user acceptance and move toward the December 2025 go-live timeline.