Human Reources: A Response to a Question

"One question to add why is it that we are out sourcing something like job descriptions? That is an unnecessary expense on the tax payers in my opinion and is easily completed by internal employees. In fact the internet has great sources to develop job descriptions internally. I see this as a waste based on the fact in my prior management position I created job descriptions for 30 different position in less than one week while completing my Dailey duties.

What was council decision on this based on and the reasoning for outsourcing this?"

Dear Name Withheld:

Thank you for the question about outsourcing some human resource responsibilities.

The Town of Kindersley is responsible for almost $100 million in assets, an annual budget of around $15 million, safe drinking water and waste and waste water disposal, safety in the community, arts, culture, and recreation services and more to a population of around 5,400. All of this is down with 54 full time employees plus summer students.

What is the Town’s greatest asset? The Haubrich Water Plant? The landfill? The waste water lagoon? The WCEC? The programming? None of these goods and services are the most valuable asset. The Town’s most valuable asset are its employees. It is due to the employees that we have a safe water and safe waste water disposal and waste management, programming, and more.

Our employees work in the public eye and are often under a lot of scrutiny from both the public and provincial and federal regulators. The public looks for some things while the regulators govern virtually everything a municipality does including the certification required by employees including their experience and scope of practise. Training and certification is needed for responsibilities such as:

·         Zamboni,

·         Ice plant,

·         Grader,

·         Bookkeeping and accounting,

·         Emergency services,

 

·          Water plant operations,

·          Water Distribution,

·          Waste Water Collection and Treatment,

·         Landfill operations,

·         Engineering,

·         Planning,

·         Arts and culture programming,

·         Recreation programming,

·         And much more.

 I think fundamentally what we need to discuss is what does an effective organization look like. In the case of the Town it has four departments: Corporate Services, Engineering, Community Services, and Transportation and Environment. Within each department are a variety of units ranging from the production of safe drinking water to scraping the roads to clearing snow, from cleaning floors to managing the inventory of trees for which the Town is responsible, from sending out water bills to aligning the budget with the strategic plan, and there is more. The Town is a serious of systems designed to accomplish its vision.

The vision for the Council of 2012 – 2016 is: “A positively engaged community building an economically and socially vibrant future.” The purpose of the Town is to create “a family friendly, multicultural community that is safe;” an organization that is “approachable, innovative, and fiscally responsible management;” and has a “forward looking approach to recognizing and fostering opportunities, solutions, and wealth creation.” The implementation of the vision and purpose is the responsibility of the Town Employees beginning with the CAO.

Council, back in the spring of 2013, developed a list of 5 priorities we want to focus on including: open communication, financially transparent, strategic growth, reliable infrastructure, and organizational effectiveness. To effectively and efficiently address these priorities is again the responsibility of the Town Employees.

What has been created here is the needs, wants, and goals of the organization. On the other hand are the needs, wants, and goals of Town Employees. The role of human resources is to ensure, as much as is reasonably possible, that the needs, wants, and goals of the both the organization and the employee are in alignment.

The tension between the organization and the employee can be perceived in a couple of ways:

·         Does the organization view employees as passive and lazy who prefer to be led and are resistant to change while management’s purpose is to ensure employees important needs are met while they work?

·         Is management’s task to be directive by creating narrowly defined jobs requiring few skills and little decision making?

Or:

·         How does an organization respond to individual desires for useful work?

·         How well do jobs enable employees to express their skills and sense of self?

·         How well does work fulfill individual financial and life-style needs?

Organizations, in this case, the Town, and employees need each other. When there is no alignment between an organization and employees then both the organization and the employees suffer. In the case of the Town the ramifications of misalignment affects more than 5,000 people. The Town’s most valuable asset is its employees and their skills, attitudes, energy, and commitment are the Town’s intrinsic resources, in conjunction with the skills, attitudes, energy, and commitment of all of Kindersley’s volunteers in all of its sectors, that determines the level of success Kindersley has in creating and maintaining a positively engaged community building an economically and socially vibrant future.

The hiring of a human resource professional is a step towards ensuring that the residents of Kindersley have an effective and efficient organization working for us. We have been working hard to address the infrastructure deficit, to address the challenges at the WCEC, to address the development of Phase 2, to address the delivery of health care services; we also have to work hard to ensure the organization and its employees, our most valuable asset, can have the resources needed to successfully meet the challenges before us.