About the Department and Position: The City is seeking a sound customer-service approach to HR designed around customer needs, increasing engagement and retention, and reducing legal liability. Thus, outstanding change management and technology skills are essential.
The City employs 2,500 full-time employees across 34 departments. The
HR Director will report to an Assistant City Manager. The HR Director oversees an operating budget of $2.7M and a health care fund of $36M, with 22 HR staff providing oversight of all City programs meeting the organization's human capital needs services in the HR function areas of recruitment and selection, benefits administration, employee relations, employee development, employee medical services, and human resources information and data management. The Department currently uses a centralized system with a mixture of individual specialists and generalists.
Given that the staff's current focus is on carrying out the compliance and transactional functions of HR, the focus of the HR Director will be on transforming the Department into a strategic operation. Increasing accountability and consistency of policy decisions coming from HR is an important skill and expectation to be met. To learn more about the Department, visit https://www.cityofws.org/656/Human-Resources.
Key priorities, among others, for the next HR Director will be:
- Assessing department staffing and training needs to ensure outstanding HR customer service outcomes that lead to win-win solutions that meet compliance requirements while fostering innovation and engagement.
- Implementing a new HRIS system, once chosen, to include communication, user training, and metric-based action plans to ensure success.
- Building trust and relationships internal to HR, with other Directors, and with the workforce generally to ensure effective outcomes.
- Updating personnel and supervisory handbooks to include evaluation of policies and procedures and collaboration with stakeholders to use best practices.
- Assessing turnover both within HR and throughout the organization to ensure effective strategies for engagement, recruitment, and retention.
- Implementing the next phase of the 2024 Compensation and Classification study to include transparent and timely communication, training, and evaluation of metrics that tie compensation to retention factors.