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Happy Deaf History Month, HRD! April is the month we celebrate the contributions of our deaf, deafblind, and hard of hearing neighbors and colleagues. Health equity means making sure all our teammates can contribute, regardless of disability, so take a moment to check out the easy ways to practice accessibility below and think about ways you can make your team more inclusive!
Congratulations to our new federal triage team members! Kyla Einertson and Amanda Hovila are moving from their previous roles to new positions on Lyla Burkman’s federal triage team. Send them a message to congratulate them!
April 29: Join Café Connect: The Agency Projects and Planning Team will be hosting weekly sessions on how you can better use all of our Office365 apps – Teams, Forms, One Drive, PowerPoint, and all the others. The sessions will be held on Friday mornings at 9 am and will have both planned topics as well as an open discussion time for people to ask question. Check out the Café Connect channel in the MDH_Teams_Welcome Team to add the invite to your calendar.
Looking for Jira Training? This week we added a recording of a Jira Training session that Mary Halet gave back in August to our Stream tab. If you’re looking for an introduction or a refresher, please give it a watch. You can also find a recording of the Office Hours session that Siobhain did covering Jira tips and tricks in the Recordings Folder of our Files Tab.
HRD Employee Appreciation Day is May 13: We’ve scheduled our next HRD Employee Appreciation Day for Friday, May 13. After our last session, we got some great suggestions for future events and we decided to invite Mariann Johnson, a mindfulness expert from the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. We’re still developing ideas for the event, so if there’s something you think we should include, please email us at Health.HRDCommunications@state.mn.us or leave a note in the HRD Feedback Box. More information to come!
At our last Redesign Conversation, Susan Winkelmann gave an overview of the Work-Life Transition plans. Phase 1 of the plan is to clean out our workspaces. Everyone who will not be working in the office 3 or more days per week will not have an assigned work area, so you should have signed up for a slot to go in and clean your desk of personal items and anything you need to telework. For more information, you can see the summary in last week’s issue of Have You HRD?: Work-Life Transition: Cleanup Days, Parking, and Next Steps.
This week’s Redesign Conversation will focus on some basics of records management for you to use as you sort through the things on your desk. Siobhain will be doing an overview of
- how to tell if something is a record,
- what you can get rid of, and
- how to tell the difference between the two.
If you can’t make the session, you’ll be able to find the slides and the recording in their usual place in our HRD Team, and of course, you’re always welcome to drop by her Office Hours if you’d like some more specific help.
Last year, we launched the Employee Onboarding Information page on our HRD SharePoint as part of a series of projects designed to make getting our new staff settled in HRD a little easier. We created a welcome letter to introduce employees to the work we do in the division, shared information to help supervisors get badges, and launched our Supply Orders and Requests process.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve added a whole lot of new information to this page. Although the page is primarily directed toward supervisors and managers to help them prepare for and onboard new staff members, it has lots of useful things that are also just good general knowledge, including how to ask the HRD IT Support team for access to HRD-specific applications, how to request access to HRD SharePoint, and tidbits about GovDelivery, Teams and recurring meetings.
Last week, we did our first training session to introduce supervisor to all of the new information; you can find the recording in the Resources section at the top of the page or in our Stream tab. Thank you to everyone who came and made suggestions for improvements to the page – we’ll be adding those in the next few weeks.
Thanks also to Mary Halet for leading this project for the last year (!).
As of this week, everyone in HRD now has access to LinkedIn Learning (LiL), a video platform that we’re using across the enterprise for professional development. LiL has a huge variety of courses on everything from learning to use our Office 365 software to playing the piano, and we encourage you to talk with your supervisors about your career goals and develop a plan for using this service to develop your skills.
If you just recently got your license, you should have received two emails this week – one from MMB asking you to activate your license, and one from Dionna Jones at MDH’s Center for Workforce Development with more info about how to activate and use your account. Once you complete the activation process, we recommend you start with the How to Use LinkedIn Learning course to learn the basics, and then take a look around to see what might be useful for you. Here are some courses you could start with:
Some things to keep in mind:
- You have the option to link your LiL account to your personal LinkedIn account, if you want to. Doing so will allow you to see courses that people you know on LinkedIn have liked, and you’ll also be able to add completed courses to your profile (for some courses, there are also completion certificates that demonstrate you’ve mastered particular skills). You do not have to link your account – you can have a LIL account that is only tied to your state email address. If you want more information, you can check out the attached How to Activate Your LinkedIn Learning Account document for further details and a link to the LiL privacy policy.
- LinkedIn Learning is provided as a state resource for professional enrichment and should be used to meet your learning goals. If you choose to use the license for non-work-related learning, you’re free to do so, but please do so outside of work hours on a personal device.
Go forth and learn something!
This week, we have the following positions available. More are coming soon! Please share them with anyone that you think would help make HRD a better place to work!
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Health Program Manager (State Operations), Job ID: 52608: This position exists to direct statewide licensing, registration, and federal certification health program management for all State and federal agencies within the Health Regulation Division. The incumbent will assist the Executive Regional Operations Manager in directing and supervising major multi-faced health programs through the direction of supervisors for the improvement of care and operational and administrative practices in state and federal health care facilities. Closes April 20, 2022.
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Nursing Evaluator (Federal Operations), Job ID: 53255: These positions will provide onsite surveillance and guidance to health care providers in an effort to assure a level of quality care based upon compliance with Federal and State laws and rules which directly relate to the provision of nursing and health services. Closes August 1, 2022.
These positions are open to both internal and external candidates. If you would like to apply, please follow the steps below:
- Sign into Employee Self Service
- On My Homepage, click on Careers and enter the Job Opening ID in the Search Jobs box and click >> (Search).
- Click on the Job Title to view the job posting.
- Click Apply For This Job in the top right hand corner.
We all hear about accessibility as an important part of health equity, and sometimes it feels like a big, nebulous concept that we aren’t sure how exactly we can put into practice. Accessibility is not only a necessity when we are interacting with our stakeholders, but also within our day-to-day work within the agency.
We want everyone to be able to do their best work, and that means making sure that our meetings, documents, and correspondence are accessible to our colleagues. Disabilities can be invisible or uncomfortable to disclose, so we should go ahead and make accommodations up front.
The good news is, it’s easy to get into the habit of making things accessible! Here are some immediate steps you can take to get started:
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Use black text on white background in documents and emails. People who are low-vision or colorblind may need high contrast in order to easily read text; colors and patterns in emails can make this more difficult for them.
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Use a clear, easy to read font at a regular size (Calibri, 12 pt is preferred) in both your message text and your signature. People with visual impairments or neurological disorders may struggle to read busy or fancy fonts.
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Use headings and styles to consistently format your documents (MDH templates are great for this). People with neurological impairments may have difficulty processing information that is not clearly structured.
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Use clear, concise alt text to describe images, charts, and graphics. People who are blind/low-vision may be using a screen reader to view these items.
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Use plain language – sentences should be clear, concise, and use words most people will readily understand. The average American reads at an 8th grade level; long, complicated sentences can be difficult to process for people who are using screen readers or who have neurological disorders.
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Share agendas and documents before meetings. People with visual impairments may have difficulty reading a document through the screen share feature; people with neurological disorders may need more time to process information in order to be able to participate fully in the discussion.
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State your name before you speak in meetings, especially when you aren’t on camera. People may be using captions or an ASL interpreter to participate in the call, or they may not be able to identify you only by your voice.
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Speak clearly and at a regular pace and volume. People may be using captions or an ASL interpreter to participate in the call.
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Raise your hand and wait for the meeting leader to recognize you. People may be using captions or an ASL interpreter to participate in the call; people may have difficulty following the conversation if more than one person speaks at a time.
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Use the Accessibility Checker features in Office or Adobe programs before sharing documents. This provides an easy way to make sure your document is accessible before you share it. It’s just as important as spell-check!
One thing you may have noticed from reading through these is that they are pretty common-sense strategies for making sure that information and communications are clear for everyone, regardless of whether they have a disability. Clear communication helps us all do our work more effectively.
If you’d like to learn more about accessibility, the Office of Accessibility has self-paced trainings available to help you improve! You can also check out the Intranet page on Accessibility at MDH for resources or contact HRD’s Accessibility Coordinator, Siobhain Rivera.
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