Dear HR&B Colleagues:                                                          August 2008

As you know, OP restructuring efforts have picked up speed as the summer has progressed, and the same can be said of our efforts in HRB. At this point in the process, I have some important information to share with you.

First, Executive Vice President Lapp and I have had my initial meeting with President Yudof to present our HRB restructuring plans. He has asked for more information and is encouraging us to continue our efforts to be more strategic, more efficient and smaller. Based on some of the objectives for our department that Katie and I discussed with the President , we are making one significant change in our plans: we are moving up the development of the strategic unit that we originally planned to implement in the 2009-10 fiscal year. As a result, we will be posting the Executive Director position for that unit very soon, and we hope to complete the hiring process by late September.

This new development leads to other changes. In my last message to you, I said we hoped to announce the new Executive Directors by early August. However, with the hiring of the additional Executive Director position, I have decided to wait to announce all four Executive Directors at the same time, which means the announcement will not be made before the end of September.

Meanwhile, work continues on classifying the rest of the positions in our organization, and we expect that work to be completed in the next two weeks. Once this task is completed, we will release our final organization chart and the job descriptions.

At that point, we will also be able to begin the staffing process. Currently, we plan to post the majority of our open positions on August 29. However, we will not begin the actual hiring process until the Executive Directors are in place. Our intent is that interviews will be held and jobs filled by level, starting with the second level (managers reporting to Executive Directors). We are taking this cascaded approach to filling the positions because we believe the supervisor-employee relationship is important to quality work. We want supervisors to be a part of the hiring process and we want employees to know who will be supervising a unit when they interview for positions.

We also are working on the final details of the staffing process, including how jobs will be reassigned. Watch for more information about the process prior to the posting of the open positions.

As we know from experience, our plans are subject to change; the evolving budget process, clarification of the President's vision for OP and the OP-wide consolidations all continue to affect us. I appreciate your patience, your flexibility and your continued hard work to serve our employees and retirees.

P.S. Several more questions and answers have been posted on our HRB restructuring website. Please continue to submit your questions and we will try to answer them as soon as possible.