Carroll County, MD Board of County Commissioners Open Sessions, 15 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Organization, Design, and Compensation Study Presentation

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Carroll County Government
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Okay, this is going to take a little longer than the typical request for concurrence.

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Because this is far from a typical item, in fact, I'm going to say a little later. I think.

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We're talking about a once in a generation sort of opportunity here.

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um When I go back a little bit just to refresh you on, where we've been and for others who might be.

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Listening to this, you know you heard presentations from human resources and management and budget.

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About our concerns on our ability to recruit, engage and retain employees as business items.

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Have come to you, you've heard from other directors about their concerns about getting employees and.

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I think in casual conversation, just around the organization you've heard from probably.

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Many people about concerns in different ways on this, this topic and all of you at time. One time.

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Or another have shared your concerns about what is going on and what we can do about this, and we.

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Talk about concerns there's a lot of things in the mix, but just again to give people a little.

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Sense of what we're talking about you know, one is a lack of applications, we're posting jobs and.

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We're just not getting many applications, sometimes no applications where we are getting applications.

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Often they're not good applications, they're people who just aren't qualified for the job.

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Because of those things we find ourselves, reposting jobs, sometimes twice three times.

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And that's led to a growing number of jobs that we have posted until filled. Now we're not even.

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Putting a date on it, we're just saying: keep the applications coming until we find somebody.

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We're also finding a growing problem with people who are going through the entire process.

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And getting to the point where we're saying we want you to come work for carroll county.

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And they're rejecting the offer we have problems with compression one. We talked about a lot in the.

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Budget process, the mandated changes to minimum wage or creating compression with the lower end.

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Of our our pay scale, but we have compression problems in other ways. You know we know where.

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We haven't given salary increases or salary increases, have been largely devoted to colas.

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Scales move, but people don't move through the scale, meaning people are getting closer and closer.

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To each other, we have problems where sometimes you know moves to supervisory positions. Don't look.

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That appealing, because the amount of money they're gonna get for taking on the new responsibilities.

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Just doesn't seem all that attractive and we have concern about looming retirements.

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And I use looming with intent. You know this is hanging over us. We we know, we you've already seen.

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Quite a few people go and people who've been here done, it know their stuff and.

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Now we're picking up after them, but there's there's more to come. We don't know the timing.

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But we know people are going to be leaving and we lose all that institutional knowledge. Yes, so the.

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Board has heard all this and recognize. We have a problem and you asked us what are some solutions.

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So, as roberta mentioned in august, you took the first step.

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You approved us issuing a request for proposals on rfp to look for a firm that could help us.

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With this, and also to seek out an existing competitively bid, contract for the same purposes,.

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We chose that parallel process because of time concerns the time. Concerns were driven.

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Because of your desire to have this information available in time for the next budget process,.

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You know the reality of the size of this job.

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And meeting that time frame is it's not a nice neat fit and we needed all the time we could get.

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Finding an existing contract would be a shorter process than an rfp process.

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Meaning we have more time left to do the work.

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So we issued an rfp basically in case we could not find.

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An existing contract and with the rfp, we also needed to acknowledge the possibility.

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That we might not get get bids on the entire package. Remember there's three pieces to this.

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And if it played out that way, that might mean we are working with multiple vendors.

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These things are all tightly entwined working with different vendors on different pieces of this.

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Would not be how we want to do this, but that was a possibility. There was also the.

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Possibility that we would get no responsive bids- and you don't know until you until you get there.

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So, given our circumstances, our clear preference was to find an existing contract. If we could.

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Now, in doing that, need to understand, there's not some place, we can go.

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And just say: let's see all the existing contracts, so we can work our way through them. This is more.

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Like getting to a pile of leaves and searching to try and find the leaf that you that you want and.

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We were working at that and we had good luck. I'd say we came across a neighbor who had something.

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That matched up well with what we wanted to try to do so. We found that contract. We came to agreement.

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With a vendor on how we could make that work here, which is what leads us to being here today,.

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Now, after we found that contract, we pulled back the rfp.

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And we knew that these parallel processes were a less than ideal situation and we understood there.

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Was a possibility that if we found an existing contract, we could end up with an unhappy bidder.

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Who's saying wait a second, you know what about us and in fact that has happened. We have heard from.

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An unhappy bidder- and we regret that it played out that way. But you know, given the time constraints.

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We had, we just didn't see any other path forward, except to try to to go at it in two different ways.

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So again that brings us today and the request for concurrence now using an existing competitively.

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Bid contract we've worked with the vendor to agree on a scope of work that both meets our.

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Needs what are we trying to get out of this and that they are saying? Yes, we can get this done.

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In the time frame that we're talking about one thing we wanted to avoid was get an agreement.

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With somebody who says, oh yeah, we can do that and then find out that they couldn't.

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And the thing that's driving this getting this in the budget process, for you not happening so we've.

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Worked very hard to try and make sure we believe that what we're bringing to you is actually doable.

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Okay, let's study I talked about there's three pieces: it's going to look at organizational.

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Design, it's going to look at classifications and it's going to look at compensation.

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These are all necessary pieces of considering that big idea, how do we attract, engage and retain.

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Employees another way to think about this, instead of in this kind of hr world talk, is.

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We want to be looking at how we provide services. What positions do you need to provide those.

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Services and then how do you compensate the people who are doing that work and as we go through this.

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Process, I want to make sure you understand we're going to be working very closely with the vendor.

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This is not just something they go off and and do this is going to be a lot of work for us as well.

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Now part of this is just about providing stuff to them. We're going to need to give them data we're.

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Going to need to give them our positions, we're going to need to give them history and context to.

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Help them understand who carroll county is and how, how we work and how we got to where we are today.

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But it's also going to be about kind of evaluating where they're going. What they're finding.

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uh We can't afford to just wait to the end to say what did you figure out and then react to.

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This we want to get to the end in a position to do something about this, so we're going to be working.

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With them along the way to try and get to an end product that is going to be useful to you and to.

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The organization this is a good place to stop and emphasize an important idea. I kind of said.

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This, but I think it's so big, I want to just say it clearly again, while individuals have interest.

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In seeing their compensation go up, I don't think you find many people in the building. Who'd say.

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uh A raise, don't worry about it, I don't. I don't need that people keep people care, but that's not.

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What this is about? That's not what's driving this effort from an organization point of view.

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We have concerns about our ability to provide services. That's what we're doing here, we're.

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Trying to figure out how do we continue providing the services that people expect.

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If we get your approval today, here's what the timeline will look like we'll have a kickoff.

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With segal the first week of october, uh we need to get right to work on this. We don't have any time.

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To to waste here, the work will begin with the organization design. Part of of this.

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This is looking at. How are we structured? Are there changes we should make? How do we provide services.

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Or can our processes be improved in some way? All these questions will have implications for how.

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We classify our positions and how we compensate our positions, so this needs to be leading the way.

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If you did this in a different way, what you could come up against is you go through and.

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You figure out your classifications, then you change the organization which would.

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Mean you have to reconsider the choices you already made. We don't want to do that.

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The classification and compensation portions of this are going to look at all of our positions.

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The relationships between our positions and how our compensation.

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Compares to to the market so part of this is about how do we make sure we've got it right internally,.

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But then it's also comparing us to what's going on around us and I say a market comparison.

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Make no mistake: we are in a market we're competing for people and right now we're not competing well.

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And our competition is other local governments, but it's not just local.

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Governments we're competing against the private sector. Now there's some places where.

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We will never be able to go up against the private sector for certain positions. They're.

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Just going to pay more than we're ever going to be able to consider, but there.

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Are places where this is relevant to us and I'm not saying this is the only one but we're.

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Watching young, mcdonald's and walmart's and those businesses raise their their pay. That's changing.

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Our ability to attract people to some of our our jobs.

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There's just no getting around it, we have to think about. How are we going to deal with this.

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So we should have a market survey and an estimated budget impact.

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Of that in late march, which will be in time to consider for the budget process, it would.

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Be really good for us to have that information earlier than that, but we worked hard to make sure.

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That at least could be available in time to still get consideration as we go through the process.

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Much of the work will be done by the end of may again facing the realities of the.

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Time we have some of the work won't be done until the end of june. Ideally,.

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We would have all this done in march or in february, but that's just not possible.

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So we're doing our best to work with the realities of how much time this is going to take.

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And then, in july, we'll come to you with a series of budget transfers to take money from some.

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Holding place to get it out to all the appropriate places where it would be spent now, on monday,.

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There's a cost to this. Unfortunately, we couldn't get anybody to just say: let us help charity work.

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So the cost of doing this organization, design, classification and compensation work is three.

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Hundred thousand dollars three hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money. There's.

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No getting around it, uh I believe we need to do this, and I'm gonna talk a little bit more.

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About my thinking on that, in just a second back to commissioner rustin's comment earlier.

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We will both need you to approve this contract for concurrence and to approve a transfer from.

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The reserve contingencies uh to my budget. uh This had to go somewhere. There's no obvious.

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Place to put it so we're just gonna put it in in my budget. Don't worry, it doesn't give me any.

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Room to spend any other money that I wouldn't have spent, otherwise it just gets this study paid for.

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Now I said earlier, I think we have a once in a generation opportunity.

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I've been here for 27 years, and we have not done anything like this. Not once, and I don't know when.

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The next time is going to be, but it's not just about. We haven't done this. There's there's a.

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Growing need for us to do it. You know our budget, our ability to provide services have been getting.

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Squeezed for decades, we were hurt in the great recession and we stabilized, but we never really.

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Recovered you know, we've talked about some of our problems. Those problems are not going.

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Away and in fact, they're getting worse, there are some statistics that hr shared with you.

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Previously, uh we're actually seeing things worse than what we told you a month ago or two months.

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Ago or three months ago, there's no reason to think things are going to get better on their own.

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You've already noted the concerns that are making their way to you, and I think I can say with.

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Absolute confidence, if we don't do something to change where we are, those things are still.

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Going to keep coming to you, except we're going to be dealing with them in a piecemeal way. Let's.

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Take care of this problem then we'll take care of this problem and part of what comes out of that is.

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Every time we make one of those moves, there are implications for other parts of the organization.

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That aren't being considered so we fix one problem, but maybe we create three other problems.

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This cries out, I think, for a comprehensive look and solution.

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Now you know my concerns about our fiscal position. You know, I'm not the one sitting.

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Here saying, don't worry, everything's, okay, and you also hear me all the time.

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Saying we need to be careful, we need to think about the implications of what we're doing here.

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So when I come saying that we need to spend money on this survey and then the money that's going to.

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Come to do something about what would come out of it, I'm not coming to the to this casually.

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I'm I'm coming to you because I deeply believe we have to do something and.

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If we want to be able to keep providing the levels of service, the mix of services and the.

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Levels of service that we have out there if we want to keep doing that, I believe we are going.

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To have to do something or you're going to be faced with choices to say what do we stop doing?.

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So that's where we've been where we are and a little bit about where we're heading.

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We can take questions from you now if you have any uh after questions or if there are.

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None then we'd be looking for two actions: one for concurrence on this contract and one to approve.

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The transfer from reserve contingencies to management and budget administration.