☆ Oliverio: Absurdly long new hire onboarding process contributes to SJ City's labor woes
Are local unions saber-rattling over a potential strike, or is it just an oblique way to throw hair at a mayor who beat their chosen candidate last fall? Planning Commissioner and former CM Pierluigi Oliverio chats on the phone with Opp Now about the latest skirmish between City management and unions over new contracts. An Opp Now exclusive.
Opportunity Now: Unions are squawking about vacancies in SJ City staff—even though the vacancy rate at 4th and E. Sta Clara is actually a little lower than other cities regionally and in California. Other local commentators are saying: What's so bad about the vacancies? It provides a platform to find out if City staff is properly organized and deployed. How should we understand these competing views?
Pierluligi Oliverio: There is no doubt vacancies slow down the work of organizations across the board. If you're putting forward a proposal for a new commercial building and there aren't enough people in the planning department to process your application, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
ON: People might suggest the application process is onerous and unnecessarily bureaucratic, anyways. Maybe better not to do it at all.
PO: I don't think most people would say the same about constituent-facing personnel such as police and libraries.
Look, at the end of the day, the City provides services to its citizens. They deliver those services through front line staff. I can see how people might find the work of some departments to be controversial, but most aren't, and these vacancies affect all departments. They have an impact on various functions of the city.
ON: Fair enough. But I am assuming nobody at City Hall actually *wants* these vacancies. Why are we having so much trouble filling the positions?
PO: The vacancy rate is a problem nationally because the onboarding process for new hires in government is absurdly long. Check this out: In the City and County of San Francisco, it takes 255 days to bring on a new employee. I don't know a lot of people who are willing to wait almost a year to start a job. It chases the most talented people away, as they can get hopping in the private sector and bring home a paycheck much faster. Recruitment and onboarding new government employees takes too long, consumes more resources than necessary, and results in losing qualified applicants.
ON: How do we fix that?
PO: Changing the status quo requires acknowledging and visually understanding the numerous and various deviations from the standard process, which is known as "process mining." Process improvement requires leadership and technology to enshrine a secure and streamlined process. We need to identify these inefficiencies that consume all these extra resources. It requires leadership from the elected officials and executive management to solve this.
These elongated processes cost the City a lot of money in opportunity costs and losing good applicants. The customer experience for an applicant today is not ideal. This is one of those "we need to break the status quo" moments.
ON: Does this skirmish remind you of issues you faced when you were a CM?
PO: Having participated in 500 closed session meetings, it often felt like Groundhog Day. The way these negotiations move forward can be very slow and difficult, especially since all of the information relayed is secondhand, but that's the current closed door process of negotiations. To be clear, neither councilmembers nor front line staff really know what is being said since these are closed door meetings. During my tenure on council, the building inspectors went on strike, but of course that was ultimately resolved. Union membership in that case felt striking was an appropriate method to get to the final deal they wanted. Fun fact: CM Nora Campos was the only councilmember to not cross the picket line.
But it's important for citizens to remember that a strike really doesn't help either side. Union members burn down their vacation time when they're on strike, and citizens won't stand for it when strikes go on indefinitely and core services are put on hold. When the difference comes down to one percent here and there, I just think it's better for morale and expended resources to accept the increased aggregate spend on payroll with the goal of city staff doing their best work on behalf of the city's residents and showcasing that success.
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