Juneau, Alaska (KINY) – The Juneau Assembly is considering sign-on bonuses, maximized flexibility, and enhanced retirement benefits to attract and keep city workers.
More than a quarter of city employees are new, being on the job for less than a year, as more experienced employees age out of the workforce and younger workers stay for shorter and shorter periods of time.
The most notable workforce shortages are in the police department and nursing staff.
In an email sent out by Bartlett Regional Hospital’s CEO, it’s estimated by 2030 that Alaska will have the biggest nursing deficit in the nation.
Alaska needs 7,500 nurses a year in the state and currently, schooling systems graduate 800.
City Manager Rorie Watt said most of their time is spent training new staff which makes it challenging to get work completed.
“Every city department, or every group of 20, or 30 employees, has one less 10-year employee, or 10 plus-year employees and one newbie. It’s just harder to get work done. Some months ago, we were short-staffed in community development, the planning part is having trouble hiring planners, I think we still have one opening. We always are trying to hire police officers. We’re always in a deficit. Engineers and architects, really hard to hire, and HR consultants. So with staffing shortages, in shorter tenured employees, we spend a lot more time putting out job notices, interviewing people, hiring people, training people, and training new managers on how to be supervisors.”
Watt noted that COVID has affected a lot of people and part of the challenge in finding workers are the workers being willing to transition back after the pandemic.
He also said it’s not just about economics, but “being a good employer who takes care of their employees and gives them good opportunities.”
Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said the City recently implemented a telework policy.
“It allows for individuals who have jobs for whom teleworking is conducive to confirm that with their supervisors and department heads. The complete telework agreement kind of outlines what the expectations are for both the employer and the employee, and how it’s applicable to their specific position. And then that enables two out of five days per week of telework. We have some exceptions to that, as with many policies, there’s not a one size fits all sort of model. As we were hiring people, one of the questions that we were getting regularly was, what’s the city’s telework policy? We certainly lost some candidates that I think we otherwise would have hired, had we otherwise had that policy in place, even just a couple of weeks earlier, really.”
Another point made was for the City to open its mind to maximum flexibility. Part of that is to keep older workers, and throw out the old mindset of “40 hours or you’re out.” More and more companies are letting their valuable older workers dictate the terms of when they work.
Another option considered is adding a sign-on bonus, Watt said.
“This would authorize a signing bonus for new employees up to $40,000 for up to a four-year commitment. Which I think would be a big inducement to get somebody to come here. We would look at the job classes we have and we would look at the market and what other employers are offering. We would try to tailor those signing bonus offers to the market and try and fill some of those top positions. And I think which job classification machines are difficult to fill will move over time. Some I didn’t mention yet are equipment operators, heavy equipment operators, commercial driver’s licenses, and bus drivers. It’s hard to find employees with a specific skill set.”
Watt notes the cost of these potential bonuses would be paid with lapsing personnel funds. The Assembly would get less money lapsed back, but would not take a new appropriation.
The Police Department every year has the biggest lapse in the City. The signing bonus in the existing budget authorization would be for the departments that have the most hard-to-fill positions.
The City is also considering enhancing retirement benefits and looking for ways to support childcare costs for employees to help the retention of current employees and recruit new employees.
For retirement benefits, the City “really wants to get contributing voluntary labor savings.”
The reason is that a full career as a lower moderate wage earner in Tier Four is “not enough to retire on.”
The City counsels employees to consider voluntary contributions to the deferred compensation program in an attempt to get people to start saving enough so that it would supplement retirement and allow them a potentially long and comfortable retirement.
The proposal would be that a 6% employee contribution would yield a 3% employer match.
Barr spoke on childcare issues.
“I think that childcare continues to be a challenge in our community. We hear pretty commonly, from our employees that childcare is one of the most challenging things that they face from an employment perspective. And the stats support that outside of Juneau too. But we know that to be very true locally. We currently have a dependent care flexible spending account that we provide as a voluntary benefit. The reason why an employee would take advantage of it right now is that it’s a tax-advantaged account that they can contribute pre-tax dollars into, not be taxed on those dollars, and then they can use those dollars to pay for eligible expenses. The most common type of eligible expense is childcare. There’s more than that, but that’s the major one. The proposal for this, second of three, that we’re talking about is to provide an employer contribution to that account, up to $5,000 that employees could use for those eligible expenses.”
The City continues to consider these options and more in an effort to retain staff.
