Cook County begins multi‑year overhaul of personnel policies and rolls out staff training plan

Allison Lisonbee, Cook County’s HR director, told the committee on Jan. 20 that her office has inventoried roughly 60 personnel policies and is beginning a staged, multi‑year process to update them and move them out of a single, static handbook into separate, updatable policy files. "So what I'd like to do today, is provide you kind of a high level overview of what myself at the HR department is doing with, review of our county policies," Lisonbee said.

Why it matters: County officials said the mix of unwritten practices and out‑of‑date policy has created confusion for employees and supervisors, and that many items have not been reviewed in years. Lisonbee and other members said separating policies into individual documents will make targeted revisions and tracking changes easier and speed legal review and committee consideration.

What HR found and will do: Lisonbee said many personnel rules are embedded in a single employee handbook and that some long‑standing practices are not written anywhere. She cited one example of a practice not in the handbook: "paid time off is 1 example that we have a cap of 520 hours in an employee's paid leave bank," she said, noting that practices such as accrual increases based on consecutive years of service also lack written policy language. To address gaps and overlap, HR has used templates and model policies from the DDA/AMC collaboration and the Minnesota Management and Budget (MMB) website to identify missing policy titles and to compare content with peer counties.

Process and timeline: Lisonbee described a stepwise workflow: draft a revised policy, bring it to the personnel committee for feedback, send it to the county attorney for legal review, then present it to the board for approval. Committee members discussed establishing regular review cycles after the inventory is complete (annual for some policies; every three to five years for others). The group estimated a drafting pace of about two policies per month; committee members noted that pace would make the project a multi‑year effort.

Training tied to policy work: HR is pairing policy updates with a training program drawn from staff survey responses and strategic‑plan priorities. Lisonbee said HR generalist Mike Krusar has begun drafting a rotating schedule of short trainings and larger offerings. Recurring topics HR proposed include harassment prevention, CPR/first aid/AED certification on a multi‑year cadence, travel‑reimbursement processes, and training tied to a new workplace violence policy. Lisonbee emphasized department‑level training as a complement, highlighting the Highway Department’s quarterly supervisor sessions as a model.

Leadership session and next steps: Lisonbee announced a full‑day mission‑critical leadership workshop with presenter John Lockhorst planned for Friday, Feb. 27, with the morning session for managers and supervisors and an afternoon session for commissioners. She said further details and calendar information will follow and that personnel‑committee meetings will begin to receive drafts as they are ready.

Outlook: Committee members encouraged use of tested templates and careful legal review to ensure enforceability, suggested tracking the rationale for policy changes (a change history), and flagged coordination with collective‑bargaining agreements where contract terms affect policy content. There were no formal motions or votes on policy language at the session; the committee adjourned after the presentations.