STRATEGY
PRIORITY 1: KEEP ‘EM When good people leave, the numbers don’t add up: How City staff and City Council prioritized retention in 2019 to help save over a million dollars annually of taxpayer dollars,
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n recent years, the City of Minot faced a rising employee turnover rate that was negatively impacting not only staff morale and experience levels, but the overall budget as well. At the end of 2017, the turnover rate was an alarming 14.9 percent, with 17 open positions. Many short-staffed departments were unable to address longterm projects, instead having to crosstrain staff members on the fly simply to keep up with the day-to-day work. Plus, constant turnover meant constant training, and that gets expensive very quickly, especially in the Police Department and Fire Department where each staff member can require approximately $70,000 in training. City Manager Tom Barry said as part of the preliminary budget process, he gathers input from staff, department heads, and Council members as to their budget priorities. “One of the priorities that everyone agreed on was to stabilize the workforce by implementing budget strategies focused on improving employee retention and reducing turnover,” Barry said. “So that was one of our main marching orders right at the beginning of the 2019 budget process.”
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Department heads conducted market research and gathered input through an employee survey, and then went to work trying to make significant changes. “Human Resources Director Lisa Jundt and the entire HR department developed an employee survey to identify what was important to staff members. We also asked department directors what they thought was important and what would make the biggest impact,” Barry said. “We used all that data to develop some strategies that we thought would make a big difference in retaining staff members.”
THE IMPROVEMENT PLAN
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he comprehensive workforce improvement plan included several major upgrades, including a tuition reimbursement program, increased vacation and sick day accrual rates, added a flexible spending account option, increased vacation rollover, improved the City’s health care contribution, and added the North Dakota Public Employees Retirement System. “With every one of our pay plans, we do a survey of similar benefits in other municipalities. We’ve always been a little bit short on our benefits,” Jundt said. “When
we were having retention issues, we realized it’s not always the pay that was the problem for us. We thought if we enhance the overall benefit package, that would be a better retention tool for us.” The City Council approved the changes, which were incorporated into the 2019 budget at a cost of approximately $567,837. The results have been dramatic. • End of 2017: Turnover rate 14.8 percent, 17 open positions. • End of 2018: Turnover rate 12.56 percent, 9 open positions. • End of 2019: Turnover rate 7.67 percent, 5 open positions. City staff determined that reducing the turnover rate by just 2 percentage points would create enough turnover-related savings to cover the cost of the improvements. In the first year, the plan paid for itself. But the cumulative reduction in the employee turnover rate in less than two years amounts to a 54 percent reduction, saving more than $2.1 million in turnover-related costs over two years. “Our vacancy rate is low, which means we’re filling positions more efficiently
