The Village of South Jacksonville is on the verge of completing a task that was taken up more than four years ago.
Village Treasurer and Office Manager Mindy Olson gave an update to the South Jacksonville Village Board on Thursday about the completion of an employee manual for non-union village employees.
Olson says completing the manual is something that’s long overdue: “When I got here, I realized that the employee manual was grossly outdated and needed to be updated to current legislation, current rules, things like that. It’s been a couple-months project to try and get it done, get a draft ready for the board to review, and get it in place. Hopefully, we’ll do that by January 1st so it can take effect.”
Olson says the last employee manual dated back to 1999 and didn’t include things that have been updated or are simply new items that the HR world has regulations for now: “Social media [rules] weren’t there because obviously it wasn’t really there in 1999. That’s a big thing now that we have. The pregnancy policy is another one that was kind of an equal opportunity-type policy that has just recently come into the HR world, so that was put in there. We’ve done some tweaking on some of the vacation/sick time policy to put a cap on it just so that people are not continuing to accrue, and then, at the end of the employment term, take everything at one time. Then, it costs the village a lot of money at that point in time.”
Olson says that current employees and department head were involved in the process of making changes and updates to the manual. Olson says that the final draft is a pretty standard employee handbook. A ordinance to approve the handbook is expected to be made at the next official village board meeting.