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In Touch with Tennessee
In Touch with Tennessee
Exploring the Evolution of HR Practices in Tennessee
Ever wondered how the intricate world of Human Resources operates in Tennessee cities? Can you distinguish between the HR practices in the public and private sectors? Join us, along with our brilliant HR consultants, Betsy Cunningham, John Grubbs, and Peter Voss, as we unravel the complexities. We'll tackle everything from goals and recruiting processes to regulatory oversight in both sectors.
Hi and welcome to In Touch with Tennessee, a podcast of the University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service. Joining me today to talk about all things. Human resources, and specifically human resources for Tennessee cities are municipal technical advisory services, HR consultants Betsy Cunningham, John Brubs and Peter Voss. Welcome, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Our pleasure. Good afternoon, susan, thank you.
Speaker 1:So can we go around and have each of you introduce yourselves and tell us how long you've been with M-TAS and a little bit about your role with the agency?
Speaker 2:Sure, my name is Peter Voss. I've been with M-TAS now for about three and a half years. I am the West Tennessee Human Resource Consultant, where I have about 110 cities. Nine of them have populations greater than 10,500. So that kind of looks like the majority of my cities are actually small.
Speaker 3:And I'm Betsy Cunningham, and I too, like Peter, have been here for three and a half years. We started around the same time. I work with East Tennessee cities and I have 113 customers approximately, and my customers range. They may have an employee population of five, which is probably one of the smallest, and then 2,500 is the largest city that I work with.
Speaker 4:Hi, I'm John Grubs. I'm the Middle Tennessee HR consultant. I've been with M-TAS overall about eight years. I did take a hiatus in the middle and I rejoined the organization when Peter and Betsy joined. I have 124 cities that range from really large metro Nashville to really small I'm not going to name the city, but they only have one employee.
Speaker 1:Oh, my Okay, but those HR issues should be pretty easy to handle them. You would think Okay, can you give us examples of the types of things that you've helped cities with?
Speaker 2:Well, of course we review their employee rules and regulations. I think that's just ongoing. We also provide assessment centers to help them hire their department directors and city managers and, of course, we give advice concerning employment problems and issues that are probably pretty specific for each city and we help city develop policies.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you know, peter mentioned selection processes, assessment centers, and we've been spending some time over the last year and a half really kind of unpacking and repacking that internally so that we can provide a little bit better, a little bit safer process for our cities, a little bit more reliable, more blended to it, because, if you think about it, when they do find talent I'm sure we'll touch on this at some point talent's hard to find. When you find people interested and work for you, you want to make the right selection. So that's a lot of what we spend our time on and of course it's. Peter mentioned policy design. We're all three together this week actually to revisit the updating of the personnel policies and apply those so that we can use them for all things that we come in contact with.
Speaker 3:And the only thing I would add to that is we also get involved in training as far as our skill sets are concerned Supervisory training, HR related training, compliance matters regarding FMLA, maternity, paternity leave, act things that your frontline supervisors and managers need to know about. We consult with and ultimately train on those type of topics when that's a need for the city.
Speaker 1:So what are some of the differences that you might see in public sector human resources versus human resources with a private sector organization?
Speaker 2:Well, of course, the public sector is funded by tax dollars. That's probably one of the biggest difference, because private sector courses of business and why are you in business? To make a profit, and the private sector is not there to make a profit, but they're there to provide services to their citizens. Of course, there's a lot of rules and regulations in the public sector. Where the private sector, they can set their goals pretty straightforward. Managers use data and they can really define what measures they need as they plan their business strategies.
Speaker 2:Of course, if you're trying to set goals in the public sector, you've got a pretty large group of people that you have to satisfy with Private sector. Also, when you get into the hiring and recruiting process, of course they have employment contracts and so they can, depending on what's going on with their business, they can either hire or they have to contract their business and they have to lay off or furlough people, and there's also, I think, more opportunity for advancement in the private sector. So those are some of the things that I see out there. That's, you know, a difference between private and public sector.
Speaker 4:Well, you know there's some similarities. I was looking at some of the data that we have here at M-Pass. You know we have 345 cities in Tennessee. Only 62 of those have formal HR departments. We were just talking about this the other day. That's about 82%. That don't. If you look at some data out there, in the private sector only about 70% of small businesses have well, 70% of small businesses have ad hoc HR, kind of like small city states. So I wouldn't necessarily call it a mom and pop shop but it's not unlike the small businesses you would encounter and how they deploy HR.
Speaker 4:But you know, with those similarities some differences come into play. You've got the we'll use Gatsby and Fatsby. The differences are encountered. You know government accounting standards and federal accounting standards.
Speaker 4:So, like Peter said, the purpose of a private industry is to generate gross margin dollars in improved shareholder value. Government is purpose to provide more services with less money invested, to be faster, better and cheaper really. And approaching it from an HR standpoint, it's like you're debits and credits on accounting balance sheet. You have to kind of flip the perspective a little bit. So that's really where a lot of the differences lie. There are a lot of similarities. Government obviously has more regulatory oversight, has more, you know, has more legislation that affects them, not just on what they do but how they spend their money, how they use their money, how they budget it, and that slows a lot of the decision making down where, you know, private sector can shift on a dime, react to market pressures, react to spikes in inflation, with salary increases to keep to at least get through. You know. They have the opportunity to go out and leverage revolver accounts to borrow against their future, more so than governments do.
Speaker 3:And also, susan, I'd like to mention the politics. You know we do have politics that comes into play, and politics is not a bad thing. It's ever changing and for HR professionals like myself I made the change from the private to the public sector it's a big difference in that like, for example, I worked for three different mayors in an eight-year period and the council are commissioners of 21. And so when those change, as they do frequently, the rules of the game change for HR. So your policies and procedures that you have implemented and rolled out to all of your employees suddenly change two years later because of a change in the political climate in regards to the people who are holding those office positions. So you know, corporate politics is one thing, local politics is another thing altogether. Yeah, and they you know the new folks may have new agendas or different agendas. Again, not right or wrong, just different things. You've got to be very flexible, I think, in the public sector, and be able to roll with those changes.
Speaker 1:So what are some of the common issues that that city see in terms of human resources? You all have heard from some of your customers no-transcript.
Speaker 2:I know in the cities that I have in West Tennessee and this is probably the same for just about everybody in the country, I think is finding qualified employees to fill positions. I know that police departments and fire departments and government works departments they're all understaffed right now. For a lot of my smaller cities it is a lower pay and benefits. A lot of my smaller cities are rural cities and they just don't have that tax base out there that where they can start bringing those salaries up to attract more employees and retain them. The other thing too is, of course I'm going back over to the private sector. You got a lot of jobs that people are now working away from the office or working at home and in the public sector, well, we don't have that many jobs that you can actually classify to work out of the house.
Speaker 2:Right, you've got to provide those services, and so that's some of the issues that some of my cities are facing.
Speaker 4:So kind of looking at the labor economics of the situation. I was looking at some data the job growth in private sector just here in Tennessee year over year. We've gained 24,000 jobs in Tennessee in the last two years in private and only 7,500 in public sector. So there's a little bit of a limit just north of 45,000 people employed in the public sector in Tennessee in cities, specifically in cities. So there's limited job growth there. So you've got to be real careful when you're selecting talent, making sure that that talent can deliver the services. And part of that attraction to the job is the wage, and I'm just looking at our salary survey. Overall, the median salary for a city employee across Tennessee two years ago was 42,000. So last year it rose up to 45,000. What did you know? 7% increase, that's. That looks pretty good.
Speaker 4:Overall, though, wage increases in public sector in Tennessee has been looking at about a 3.4 increase year over year, which that's run along the line of what we're experiencing here Police officer. However, it's kind of stabilized. Two years ago it was 38,000. This past year the mean and this is some data that has aged probably eight, nine months 41,000 dollars a year, which is a 7.5% increase, which compare it the average wage for stormwater crew member or a gas worker. In 2021 it was 33,000, it's 36,000, 10% increase.
Speaker 4:But a couple of that with the decline in sworn officers seen across not just the state but the nation. You're looking at staffing levels across the country 83,000 dropping down to 79,000. Simply because they've got roughly 5% open positions that they can't feel. That's not countin' turnover. So there's some lack of wage attraction. There's also some attraction issues to doing the type of work that government does as opposed to the type of work that private sector does. We've gotta do a better job, I think, at putting together a value proposition of why people should want to work for government. Yeah, I'll go and stop.
Speaker 3:That's a good point, though, but when you think about it, particularly with our younger generations, working for the government may not be something on their radar right now.
Speaker 1:And so how would you change that? I mean, what are some ideas that you all would suggest to get the younger generation interested in public sector work?
Speaker 4:I'll feel that workforce development initiatives. I know some of our colleagues, especially over at CIS, are pretty heavily involved in workforce development for the private sector, manufacturing those, especially with little Ziddiqon and out West. They're heavily involved in that. I think one opportunity is that we leverage some of their experience, so their insight and how it applies to improving the talent pipeline here in some of the direct services that cities provide. Have some conversations with some of these technical schools, junior colleges, especially since they're pretty well scattered across the state. I know, for example, all state and Gallatin has a workforce development program for construction trades, for a firefighter, so finding ways to replicate some of that across the state may be beneficial on a high level scale. We've really got to look at some of the education requirements for some of the barriers to entry, how we paint those to the talent pool that's out there and try to attract. Then, once we attract, select and retain them.
Speaker 1:So you all talked about the workforce and of course, that sounds like it's the biggest issue. What are some of the other issues that cities are seeing?
Speaker 4:Not just what they do but how they do it. I understand things are changing, being reactive to change, trying to be more nimble. Some administration, some cities are better than others. I think it's been addressed to TCMA and West TSC Mayor's Association, some other associations statewide on how to learn from other successes across the state. I think we've got to and I think we are doing that with some of the local groups that Peter and Betsy and recently I've been involved in some HR professionals across the state starting to see an increase in collaboration, try to solve some of the problems together. I think that's grassroots effort. That's the start of a good solution.
Speaker 3:I think John mentioned, and Peter Bose, the fact that we can't find good qualified applicants out there. It's hard for us to find a good pool, but the issue of turnover and also the lack of a succession planning process in place is a real challenge. Back in the day when we started in the public sector, you went to work there at that respective city or town and you never left. Well, as we know, that's not happening now. We see individuals coming to the workplace and changing much more frequent than they once did. We've got to do a better job of training of our emerging leaders to develop people to be prepared for those positions as they turn over for people retired from that position.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I've seen here recently.
Speaker 2:I've had two or three different cities call and ask me some questions about trying to develop a policy where they would pay for six or eight weeks of maternity leave. Currently, under the Family Medical Leave Act, you have 12 weeks of unpaid leave and then under the Tennessee Maternity Leave Act, they actually have four more weeks, or 16 weeks, four months, of unpaid leave. But I'm seeing some cities out there now that are developing policies. I know rural Metro's got a policy and I was working with another city here in Westerners Sea and they were proposing eight weeks of paid leave. I think our cities are beginning to look at how can we enhance the benefits that we have in order to help those employees who who otherwise, you know they can't if it's unpaid leave, they're not gonna be able to pay their bills and so you know they'll try to find them somewhere else. So I think that's you know, something else that I'm beginning to see people looking at different ways to structure their health insurance and then, of course, offer some of those other benefits that are out there.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about HR trends and this can be in overall private sector, public sector. Some trends and of course, workforce is one of the major ones, as you touched on, but some trends that practitioner, HR practitioners are seeing in this year and will probably see in 2024.
Speaker 4:Yeah, GPT.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot okay, yes.
Speaker 4:The use of artificial intelligence. You know, right now it's a toddler chat GPT. It's been around for a couple of years. It hadn't been trained up past any information November 2021, but people are starting to experience the efficiencies that that type of model can offer. Now there's some cautions, obviously, because any artificial intelligence that you use is only gonna be as good as the training it receives. So there's gonna have to be some level of oversight. Using artificial intelligence for going faster with selection problems, analyzing information that's given to make sure that it doesn't have disparate impact, when actually you know there could be an underlying disparate treatment intent, potentially, but by and large, I think, the disparate impact analysis, how it affects unintentionally underrepresented or protected classes. I think that's a big challenge. But there's a whole lot going on right now of curiously investigating the use of AI commonly through chat GPT and what its utility is and how safely it can be used.
Speaker 2:Another issue, of course, is the impact that Forge Blue Oval City is having in the West Tennessee region, in so far as so many of the smaller communities do not have the infrastructure to actually start building out, you know, within the amount of people that are gonna come in and actually work at those facilities there, and so I hear that topic all the time.
Speaker 2:Of course, ford's also gonna be paying a little bit higher wages than some of these cities are used to. So when we were talking about lack of qualified employees, well, you know, some of those employees are gonna go to work for Ford. But there is one thing which I think is gonna be a positive Ford has been working with a lot of the school districts in and around the counties that surround the county that Blue Oval City is in, and they are implementing curriculums in those schools to start training people up so they can move up into the Ford. You know the blue oval city. But the byproduct of that is that look how many, look how much education is going to increase and that'll, to me, that'll, help develop more qualified candidates that may want to come to work for a city.
Speaker 3:Right. I think another trend is the lack of mental health professionals available to many of our employees throughout the state. I've attended a couple of seminars as I've laid, and there's a decline in those practitioners, or many of them are practicing in a virtual capacity now, and so you know mental health in the workplace has always been an issue, but I think now people it's not as taboo as it once was, people are willing to talk about that and our HR practitioners are saying, okay, help me, help my people, right? So there's a real opportunity there. Peter mentioned earlier today that you know we're working with less people, therefore there's greater stress on the people that are in the jobs, and that's a real opportunity for us to see what can be done to be more mindful of mental health in the workplace and offering solutions to help with those issues.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks a lot for joining me today. I know with just three of you you've got full plates, I would think.
Speaker 4:We say fairly busy.
Speaker 3:Yes, we do. We enjoy the opportunity to serve the folks in Tennessee, that's for sure. Absolutely, and we love you gentlemen, yes, that's a good deal.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks again for joining us.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, susan, I've enjoyed this.
Speaker 3:Yes, have a good day, thank you, have a good day.
Speaker 1:And thank you. Listeners, be sure to find In Touch with Tennessee where you look for your favorite podcast.
