By Pepper Parr
November 7th, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
Sue Evfremidis, Acting Executive Director Human Resources –
The increases to the staffing compliment are at the base of concerns and complaints about the budget increases.
Sue Evfremidis, Acting Executive Director Human Resources
Sue Evfremidis, Acting Executive Director Human Resources – started by explaining that “, our staff, our people are our most valuable and unique asset that we have.
Human Resources is responsible for developing a people strategy that is aligned with the city strategy and goals. That will ultimately increase our organizational effectiveness.
“Our ability to attract, hire and retain staff has a direct impact on our ability to achieve our goals and deliver service excellence. The employee experience drives the customer experience. When I say employee experience, I’m referring to the entire employee life-cycle from the moment that they become a potential employee for the City of Burlington to the moment that they leave and everything in between.
All of it is impacted by the HR systems that are in place today and planning for tomorrow. How they were hired, did we invest in their development? Was it the right development? Did we provide a safe and inclusive work environment? Did we address the compensation and to ensure the compensation systems were equitable? Did we recognize and reward behaviours?
“We wanted to foster that employee experience. I’ve worked for a variety of different organizations, both private and public sectors, like much like many of you here today, they ranged from classical managerial style to highly collaborative global innovative structures.
“There’s not a one size fits all people strategy. It must be aligned with the organization’s strategy and goals and must also take into consideration the organization’s current capabilities and future capabilities. If not, may not be implementing HR systems and programs but we may be implementing excuse me, HR systems and programs that are hindering instead of helping our organization to achieve our goals.
“Our city is a complex organization with multiple business lines, varying funding streams, legislations legislated highly legislative excuse me that relies on a skilled union and non union workforce, inclusive of both full time and part time staff. Within a hybrid work environment, the city is experiencing a significant transition.
Sue Evfremidis, Acting Executive Director Human Resources explained: approximately 50% of our people leaders have changed positions in the last two years.
“The community is also growing and there are many exciting and very important city goals on the horizon. And we currently don’t have a people strategy nor the HR systems in place to support this transformation effectively.
“Let me tell you the story behind the data you see. There were approximately 389 full time staff changes since the beginning of 2022. With just over 1000 full time employees, we are not large. What that means is we do not typically have the staff or the bench strength to draw upon when there are unexpected vacancies.
“On average, it takes approximately 14 weeks to hire a replacement. And many of our jobs take several months to get up to speed to be considered fully qualified. And that’s once the hiring process has begun.
“We also had a 10% overall turnover rate in 22. That’s inclusive of all the departures which is certainly not bad. What is alarming, however, is that approximately 60% of those resigning are doing so within their first three years of employment with the city. The retention of our staff has to be a top priority, and the retention of staff within the first three years of employment needs immediate attention.
“Next, the city has approximately 170 People leaders from coordinator to executive level. And over the past two years approximately 50% of our people leaders have changed positions whether internally or externally brought onboard Gartner, a world class consulting firm that specializes in a number of areas including human resources, identified the number one priority for HR departments is for leader and manager development. We are no different here at the city. It must be a priority.
“Many managers are struggling workload responsibilities have increased, and this is often further exasperated by poor organization and position design and lack of leadership development and leader pipelines. People leaders have the most direct impact on our culture, retention and service delivery. We need to have programs in place to set them up for success.
“Some major programs and approaches that could positively support our people leaders and by extension service delivery, our people leader onboarding, leadership development, succession planning, and reposition redesigns. Lastly, I want to bring your attention to the drop in our culture score. It dropped by 13% in one year, it was previously 80%: 67% of staff feel very positive or positive about working for the city.
“Culture is something that the city needs to actively foster because in the absence of a cultural direction, people leaders and staff will adopt and practice their own norms and behaviours that may not support a culture that is aligned with our goals. And not surprisingly again, Gartner’s number two HR priority was organizational culture. Some contributing factors may be fewer in person interactions for culture to succeed.
“In a hybrid world, leaders must work intentionally to align and connect employees to it equipping teams to create vibrant and healthy micro cultures. I won’t read out all the goals you have up on the slides nor the risks, however, I want to draw your attention to a couple of the mitigation strategies, increasing HR staffing to stabilize and prepare for the future is key. We need to establish a people strategy with embedded HR systems and programs. So city staff are better positioned to pivot and respond to the changing needs of the city.
“The city currently only has one full time organizational development consultant. This role is also lead for the city’s corporate learning portfolio. One role is simply not enough to do all of this and to do it well. Also, with the launch of Workday, just around the corner, real time recruiting, retention and other employee related data will be available to assist HR and people leaders to make more informed people related decisions. This must be used to its best advantage. .
This is the first time the public has been made fully aware as to just how extensive the changes really are.
What’s happened and what’s happening? “This slide is inclusive of some of the city manager and vision to focus targets. You’ll notice right away that three key city manager targets were achieved in 2022. Phase one of the non-union job evaluation program was completed in October of this year.
“The next part of this program is ensuring two distinct salary adjustment levers remain in effect, the market and the performance lever. You may recall that under our old system, it could take non-union staff upwards of 20 years to get the job reach. The second target that was met was our WSIB action incident rate. Fostering a safe a safe work environment is a fundamental part to any retention strategy. What we need to focus here in addition to the target that we met below, which is the turnover target is maintaining these achievements.
“The fourth item on the slide is related to the HR department goals as they relate to creating a PPL strategy that is aligned with both the city manager’s objectives and V to F to include the following outputs.
Sue Evfremidis,: the development of a leadership development program is critical.
“We are currently in phase one of the performance management project we hired a consultant this past summer to lead this project. A project team has been struck and the design work is well underway. I’ll talk more about this project tomorrow. Another important output is the development of an employee facing Diversity Equity and Inclusion strategy. This project work was initially delayed due to COVID. It is currently underway, albeit progressing slowly due to limited resources. This is extremely important work as a passive approach Diversity will not yield our intended results.
“The third output is the development of a leadership development program. This program work is in its initial stages. It is scheduled to ramp up after workday is launched and stabilized once workday is up and running. And we’re able to access real time data.
Workday is a user-friendly, cloud-based system that will replace the City’s current human resource and finance systems used for items such as benefits, time and attendance, recruitment payroll, financial services and procurement.
“My intention is to provide regular human resource scorecard updates to a broader to the broader audience here as well as to staff. A people strategy that is aligned with the city’s strategy and capabilities is essential to the city success.
“The employee experience drives the customer experience.”
“The employee experience drives the customer experience.”
I guess that explains the turnover problem. My customer experience has been awful. The CRM system sucks.
I’m with you Jim. In the past, I could call up a planner, an engineer in the Building Department or a forestry employee and get through directly for a short chat. Now, with practically no one actually working at City Hall, I can no longer do that. Being routed through the Customer Service Department only to finally get to a voice mail or a request to email the person means quick and direct communication with a real person on what is usually a short question and answer or a request for a service is cumbersome and delayed. Often I’ve left a voice mail and not had it returned or sent an email and received a form letter response that doesn’t come close to answering my question. After a while, you learn to give up and realize that no one is going to help you. We don’t need more staff. We just need knowledgeable staff who will talk to us and help us with our issues.
And I have a bit of a problem with the statement “The employee experience drives the customer experience”. I think it should be the other way around. The employee “experience” should be tailored to the expected experience by the customer. I am not saying “the customer is always right” that is often used in retail, but I am saying that these employees were hired by us to aid us, so their training should be focused on that in their specialty. They obviously decided to work in this type of a civic environment where service to residents is paramount, so there should be no surprise in the type of customer experience that is expected. Train for that and employees will understand what their focus should be on and everyone will have a better experience in the end, customers and employees.
100% Gary. I think it should be the other way round as well.
One of my recent experiences was being passed around like a hot potato only to end up at a voice mail that said the employee was no longer with the City.
I called back and got someone who said they’d get back to me but still hasn’t
I talked To Brynn at a break in one of the meetings last week and she answered it easily.
This is quite remarkable on a number of levels – actually the cognitive dissonance displayed is almost text book. For an organization of 1000 people, having a 17% cadre of “people leaders” does not reflect a flat or empowered organization. By contrast, the provincial government (which is certainly a bureaucracy by all counts) has a top leadership cadre (Deputies, ADMs, Directors and Senior Managers) of less than 10% for a staff complement of 65,000 which is also geographically dispersed. But the shocking data bite is the turnover rate since 2022 and the number of resignations. On its face, this suggests a work environment that has very serious problems. It has long been recognized that salary is only one factor in employee retention. More important is a work environment that is stimulating, that offers reasonable opportunities for advancement and that respects and values its staff. This turnover and resignation rate suggests quite the opposite. Filling a boatload of new staff positions will actually only hinder the sort of organizational healing that COB seems to need. Finally, is there finally a functioning performance management system operative at the City. Two years ago, the retired Head of Human Resources in a staff report to Council admitted that there was none and that she didn’t see the need. And I suppose there wouldn’t be a need if you didn’t want some means of classifying job functions, evaluating/incenting staff performance, establishing personal and organizational operational benchmarks and providing commonly understood/communicated measures of organizational objectives.
But – as Caren says and she is ‘bang on’ – this is all just “word salad” and, deservedly, it has no resonance with a public that has tired of Council rhetoric and cynical wordplay.
I agree Wendy.A load of bafflegab.
As per MMW and Paul Sharman to Burlington Today on Nov 2. Other than the firefighters, there isn’t anything on this list that I would agree to a 6.33% property tax increase. And even that should be do-able with a fiscally responsible government. I feel fairly confident that there are at least a few thousand voters who would agree with me.
As I stated repeatedly, 55% of respondents said cut services to maintain or reduce taxes. Instead MMW not only ignores that but tells the press something completely different. She instead says, ““They are expecting us to deliver services and enhanced services,” she said, noting there are 64 pages of feedback from the community with a mix of comments, but one theme stood out – additional services from the city.”
Everyone else might not want to go so far as to call her a liar. I don’t have a problem with it.
In that same press release they announce these things as some of the areas this tax increase is going towards. I must be stupid because again, other than the firefighters, I can’t see the urgency here that warrants forcing this kind of tax increase on taxpayers. Especially not when the majority have said we don’t want this.
Some of the key investments – broken down into sustaining current city services and enhancing others – include:
– Additional staffing resources in transportation, transit, customer experience, forestry and corporate support areas to meet community expectations and manage workload challenges
– A resource to support the Community Housing Initiative
– Facilities and Environment, a new department for 2024
– Additional support in the By-law Compliance department which will modernize service delivery with more staff to keep the community safe; councillors heard that – Burlington has five or six bylaw officers, compared to Oakville, which has approximately 20
– A continued transformation of City services onto new digital technology platforms with new and improved customer experiences, business processes, vendor management and fiscal efficiencies
– The continued evolution of Digital Services to deliver technology solutions to meet customer needs
– Four additional firefighters to fully staff Fire Station eight (1837 Ironstone Dr.) as recommended in the Fire Master Plan
– Revenue losses from Bill 109
– Additional winter maintenance at school crosswalks
– Improved investments in forestry service in the areas of grid pruning and pest management
– Additional resources to support community gardens
– Ongoing funding to support the Burlington Lands Partnership (2024)
– Incremental annual funding for the Multi-year Community Investment Plan (2024-2029) including a proposed dedicated provision for future strategic land acquisition
– Additional winter maintenance of various parking lots (2024)
– One-time funding to support the One Brand Project (2024) – a marketing tool that celebrates Burlington to create pride and attachment to the city
– One-time funding to support Vision 2050 (a target to become a net carbon zero community by 2050)
– The city’s contribution to the Randle Reef cleanup
This is just all “word salad”. And why does the City continue to hire so many Consultants? I’m sure there are people already on staff, and well paid, who can do these tasks very easily.
What is the cost to Burlington Tax payors for these HR Consultants. And are they really Necessary??
Blah blah blah. Taxpayers dont care. We dont care what your reasons are so stop tryng to justify it or explain it away. How is padding your salaries and hiring an extra 200 people going to stretch the taxpayers pay or fixed incomes? Oh right, that doesnt matter to you. At some point city hall decided we work for them. We dont, you work for us. We also didnt agree to a hybrid work environment. But then again its pretty clear that city hall could care less what taxpayers think! HR should keep all of this in mind for when a new mayor is elected who comes in and terminates half these new hires. Because sweeping reform and fiscal responsibility is coming. The more the mayor and council try to shove this budget down taxpayers throats, the harder the next 1.5 will be.