City council in Stratford, Ont., approved three new human resources (HR) positions at the July 22 council meeting, a huge expansion for the small department.
Dave Bush, director of human resources, said that the expansion is long overdue.
“I’m sounding the alarm bells now,” Bush said. “Because we need support internally to build this corporation to achieve our priorities. The funding for this is already built into the budget for this year. So the impact is negligible.”
Stratford’s HR department was formalized in 1988 with two positions, a director and an assistant. Over the years the department has jostled around, with titles changing and positions being formed, and now there are four positions: the director of human resources, a manager of health and safety, and two HR coordinators.
Additionally, two positions were created in the diversity, equity, and inclusion team, which are technically under the HR umbrella, although don’t support the day-to-day operations of the department.
Standard HR industry practice is an HR to employee ratio average of 1.7 HR staff, rounded to two, per 100 employees. At over 400 full-time employees, that means the city would support an HR team of eight.
Bush proposed the hiring of three more individuals – an HR assistant, a wellness, health, and safety coordinator, and an organizational development coordinator – but he also called that just the first step of many.
The department will be modernizing and working to automate certain practices once it has a full complement.
Currently, Bush said that the cost to just manually run payroll equals about 10 full-time positions at an average salary of $75,000, meaning that the expansions he recommended will have some cost-saving benefits, although noted they would be “down the road.”
As some councillors pointed out, the position would also go to helping the high staff turnover. Currently, there has been an average of 180 job postings a year for the last five years in the City of Stratford and the inability to retain talent is not without cost.
“A strong HR department will help us to be able to retain talented people who are really great,” Coun. Jo-Dee Burbach said. “If that salary was $80,000, we’re spending an extra $40,000 to pay somebody else to work overtime, to hire a consultant, to put an ad out and then hire somebody. That process takes time … It’s very expensive to have such high staff turnover so I really think this is quite critical.”
Coun. Larry McCabe even went so far as to call the staffing issue a “crisis.”
Coun. Cody Sebben didn’t believe that hiring these positions would be a silver-bullet for the turnover crisis the city faces and advocated for hiring the positions in a temporary, one-year contract capacity, though his amendment failed.
Coun. Mark Hunter also made an amendment, that the funding to offset the equivalency of the three positions be found through the implementation of a recent service review study. That amendment was unanimously passed.
In a recorded vote, Sebben, Coun. Lesley Biehn, Coun. Geza Wordofa, and Mayor Martin Ritsma opposed the hiring of the positions, which carried regardless.
Biehn argued that this expansion equals half a percentage point to the tax rate.
“I’m just concerned about doing this outside of the budget process,” she said. “I also have concern that we will be approving these before seeing all of the other expansion requests that are also coming through.”
There will be a four month impact on the 2024 operating budget of $113,681. It can be offset through staffing variance with the department, as noted in the management report, and use of the HR salary contingency reserve, which has a current balance of $69,214.
There is an expected annualized cost of $341,043, including wages, benefits, and one-time costs for cellphones and other hardware.
By Connor Luczka, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
