LAKEPORT, Calif. – At its Tuesday meeting, the Board of Supervisors decided against a proposed policy addition that would allow employees to be paid to leave work to change clothes on their first violation of a new county dress code.
Social Services Director Carol Huchingson went to the board with a request for conceptual approval of the policy addition.
Huchingson said the new county dress code policy will go into effect on July 1, and replaces an earlier version of a similar policy that calls for professional dress in the workplace.
That previous policy, she said, allowed room for “considerable judgment around what is professional.”
Copies of the full policy weren't provided for the Tuesday discussion.
“The new policy provides very specific guidelines for what is allowable, both in terms of professional dress and appearance in general,” said Huchingson.
She said the new policy has been subject to meet and confer with county employee associations, and the county made considerable revisions to it based on input from staff and Lake County Employees Association representatives.
In preparation for implementing the new policy, Huchingson said department supervisors are being trained to ensure that the policy's enforcement is fair and consistent.
For situations in which an employee violates the dress code for the first time, Huchingson proposed that, as a show of good faith to support employees as they learn to comply, the county pay the employees to go home and change when they first violated the policy.
She said that the amount of time allowed would need to be predetermined when the employee is directed to go home to change, but she said it would never exceed more than an hour and half.
Huchingson said she had worked extensively with county Human Resources Director Kathy Ferguson in working out the details, and that Ferguson supported the concept.
“I acknowledge that my request may be a bit out of the ordinary,” said Huchingson, adding that it really was a matter of better service and a more professional workplace.
In the Social Services Department in particular, Huchingson said, they offer a lot of counseling to people on how to improve their lives, and she suggested that they need needed to model the behavior that they wanted to see.
The board members, however, for the most part did not support paying employees to go home and change when they violated the work place dress code policy, even on a first-time basis.
Supervisor Rob Brown also raised concerns about having a policy for one department that was in place for other departments.
“Is this going to be a countywide policy?” He asked
He said Huchingson, in this case as in others, was at the forefront of the issue.
Huchingson said Animal Care and Control has a dress code based on the previous county dress code version.
She said in discussing the matter with Animal Care and Control Director Bill Davidson, he'd relayed that they hadn't had problems with enforcing it. Huchingson added, however, that Animal Care and Control is a much smaller department.
Unlike her colleagues on the board, Supervisor Denise Rushing favored the idea of putting the policy for paid leave to change clothing in place, at least on a trial basis.
She suggested that they could put the one time change of clothing with pay in place as a pilot program and work out the details. She pointed out that some departments have field work while others have office work.
“It seems to me the need is important here, and why couldn't we just go ahead with a pilot right now and get a sense of what it costs,” she said.
Rushing said she believed that it would be only a handful of employees who didn't get the policy and that that would quickly be sorted out.
Huchingson said that was her belief as well, that a small number of employees initially may have issues and that after a rocky few weeks it would be sorted out.
Brown said he didn't have a problem with going forward with the policy, but added that if they thought sending an employee home with no pay the second time they had violated the dress code would have meaning, think about what would happen when they were sent home without pay the first time.
“They either get it or they don't,” Brown said.
Board Chair Jeff Smith asked Huchingson if the paid clothing change policy would need to go to meet and confer. Huchingson replied that it would only need to if it was approved.
Supervisor Jim Comstock thanked Huchingson for taking on the matter. “This shouldn't be an issue, but it is,” he said.
With all of the training employees are being provided, Comstock said he believed they should understand the dress code requirements.
He said his first inclination would be to give them a chance and pay them to change the first time, however with so much training, to get paid with public funds to go home and change didn't seem right.
“I guess I have a slightly different view of this,” said Rushing, who believed it really came down to the frontline supervisors in the departments.
“It's a really hard job to be a frontline supervisor anyway,” Rushing said.
It's a hard decision, she said, to send someone home without pay for what is a minor infraction. She felt that while that was being sorted out, it would make sense to give supervisors a tool.
Rushing said sending someone home without pay is a disciplinary action, and it would be a tough call for a supervisor to make.
Smith said he also felt there was a happy medium. He said he agreed with the other supervisors about not wanting to compensate employees for dressing inappropriately.
“We're also losing productivity by sending them home,” he said.
He suggested that the happy medium was to have the employees stay at work for the rest of the day, warn them and give them a written notice, and tell them that if they returned dressed inappropriately the next day they would be sent home for a full day without pay.
Huchingson responded that keeping a person in the workplace who is not dressed appropriately actually affects others.
In the end the board's consensus was not to add the paid change provision to the new dress code policy.
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