Tuesday 3/24/09. 5 hours. Mary Jane and I spent the afternoon going through the personnel policies manual one policy at a time. We confirmed the policies that were complete, the new policies that the board of trustees has approved, and the policies we hadn’t looked at yet. We tweaked some of my policies and reviewed others for the first time.
Don Yarman, the assistant director, Mary Jane and I hashed out the Sick Leave policy. After looking at the sick leave offerings of several comparable libraries, we determined that the amount of sick time full time staff at DCDL accrue is in line with them. Some of the researched libraries also offer sick time to part time (20 hour/week minimum) employees. We had a wonderful free-flowing discussion of all the pros and cons of part time sick time – why staff deserve it, when they could use it, how it might be abused, how much it would cost, how much was appropriate, maximum number of cumulative hours, etc. There’s nothing simple about a seemingly simple decision to provide few hours of sick time. By the end of our session Mary Jane’s printout of the existing sick leave policy was completely covered with her hand-written notes. Thankfully, she’s going to rewrite the policy and spare me deciphering her cryptic scribblings.
I brought all my assigned policies on my thumb drive. It has been a challenge to keep all of our drafts in electronic and paper forms coordinated and up to date. We went through all my policies, made final changes and saved the final documents to both my thumb drive and her hard drive.
I’m going to meet one more time with Mary Jane next week to finalize the remaining policies and discuss a few more topics in depth. That should wrap up the on-site portion of my practicum.
