By Kim McDarison

The Whitewater Common Council Tuesday participated in several employee relations-related discussions, including those regarding the city’s employee stay and exit interview processes, wages and benefits as they compared with inflationary adjustments and ranges used by other municipalities, goals and objectives for a city manager, and competency categories to be used during a city manager’s evaluation. 

Additionally, council members voted against a proposal to hire a separate attorney to advise the body on matters of employee relations as they related to the city manager. A story, about the discussion related to the proposed hiring of an independent attorney, is here: https://whitewaterwise.com/council-votes-against-hiring-an-attorney-to-advise-on-city-manager-related-personnel-matters/.

Arriving at the podium Tuesday to present documents and gather feedback, City of Whitewater Human Resources Manager Sara Marquardt noted that many of the employee relations-related items appearing on the agenda were placed in response to a council member’s request made during a meeting held earlier this month.

A link to a story about the common council meeting held Aug. 1 is here: https://whitewaterwise.com/council-approves-updated-city-manager-evaluation-policy-following-protracted-contentious-discussion/.

Marquardt cited available supporting documents and a memo, as supplied within Tuesday’s meeting packet, which corresponded to each agenda item.

Employee interview process and improvements

Within a memo to council, Marquardt noted that Councilman Neil Hicks had requested that council be provided with an explanation of the city’s exit interviewing process, along with any adjustments and improvements that had been made.

Marquardt noted that the process was offered to exiting employees on a “voluntary” basis and results were confidential, to “ensure active participation.”

Additionally, she said, “verbal feedback was provided upon request of the department.”

Further, she stated, “stay interviews” are used by the city to learn why employees choose to stay with the organization. The objective is to learn “what’s working and what isn’t,” she wrote.

Employee participation in stay interviews also is voluntary, she noted.

According to Marquardt’s memo, “exit interviews are not mentioned in the Employee Handbook or in (the city’s) policy 204.1.”

Marquardt said staff was recommending to council that the process in place be allowed to continue. 

Whitewater City Manager John Weidl opened the conversation, saying: “It’s great that we are talking about this.”

He noted that the main purpose of exit and stay interviews is to determine why employees choose to leave and why they choose to stay.

Weidl said that over “several months,” the city’s human resources personnel had been examining those questions using several tools, including exit and stay interviews. 

“Over the last year, and certainly before, employees have left Whitewater,” he said, adding that for the majority of them, their decisions were based on career advancement and compensation. 

Among remedies to address issues of compensation, Weidl said the council had voted to raise the wage range in 2023, providing a 4% raise across the board. He thanked council members for “doing your part.”

“Regrettably,” Weidl said, “we have also experienced departures due to instances of poor performance, and, in some cases, misconduct.”

Such behaviors had been “investigated, documented, vetted by legal, and all resolved through employees choosing to leave as opposed to going through the disciplinary process,” he said.

Citing examples of such behaviors, Weidl noted the following list: “an employee knowingly overpaying themselves to a time that stretches back before I was city manager.” Also, he said, “we had an employee resign instead of receiving discipline for intoxication while on duty. This employee was required by job description to make use of city-owned vehicles and make frequent contact with the public.”

Additionally, he said, there were “a few situations” where individuals had difficulties “fulfilling core responsibilities,” and, he said, there were instances of “neglect of duties, serious errors, and incomplete reporting,” along with “failure to maintain training standards,” among others.

Said Weidl: “These behaviors corrode the confidence placed in us by our community and harms our reputation. If this information comes as a revelation, it’s because the city manager’s office and human resources work very hard to safeguard the personnel issue of those who departed no matter the reason.

“Everyone deserves a chance at their livelihood, even if it’s not with the city of Whitewater. As you may know, the oversight and management of personnel matters is entrusted by state statute to the city manager, and by extension, through administrative policy, to human resources. These roles encompass enforcement of conduct, redressing grievances, and ensuring accountability.”

Weidl said that city staff “is working tirelessly to mold the community founded on integrity, accountability and exemplary performance.” 

Marquardt, directing council members to information found in their packet, noted that the exit interview used by the city has been in place for “many, many years.”

Using the available tools, Marquardt said her department had identified communication and insurance as “possible issues going on within our organization right now.”

She added: “we have been doing some followup questions, trying to get at what is really going on in those issues. We do track what comes in through us as confidentially as possible.”

She said an exit interview summary was included in the meeting packet. 

She asked council for feedback.

“I appreciate everything you put in here. I guess it wasn’t necessarily making change, but more just seeing what we are doing with so many people leaving for whatever reasons, which also couples with the other (agenda item) later on about salaries wages and comparisons,” Hicks said. 

He asked for a summary on a yearly or bi-yearly bases, “to see where the issue is,” he said. 

Marquardt said she was keeping track. To date, she has collected data for a few months.

Council member David Stone asked if an item, asking interview respondents to rate the performance of the city manager and city council, which appeared in his information as one category, could be broken into two separate entities, where each —council and manager — were rated separately.

“Employees don’t work for the council, though,” Council President Jim Allen said. They work for the city manager, he added. 

Stone suggested that the document should not include the council.

Marquardt said that she “would agree to separate it. A number of people have self-separated it, so it would make some sense.”

Councilwoman Lisa Dawsey Smith said she would agree with separating it, but not removing it.

“While no employee of the city is directly reporting to us outside of the city manager, we still do heavily influence the work culturally that they are reporting to daily,” she said of council. 

Council asked Marquardt to separate the two entities for individualized evaluation by employees.

Council woman Jill Gerber asked staff to create a policy for the exit interview.

Said Gerber: “I would like to just see one to make sure it is being uniformly applied — that everybody who leaves is given the opportunity, so there is a policy in place.”

She also asked about frequency of stay interviews.

Weidl said they were conducted continuously, and it takes two years for the staff to interview the entire employee base, “based on the way we do them,” he said.

Wage, benefit comparative study

Within a memo, Marquardt noted that she was bringing information about salaries offered to city employees before council at the request of Hicks, whom, she wrote, also had asked to see comparable information with other cities.

“Salary studies are a tool for determining market pay and benefit rates to strategically attract, engage, and retain the talent necessary to meet organizational goals and objectives,” she wrote.

Marquardt said that the city last undertook a salary study in “approximately” 2016 or 2017. It was performed by Springstead, Inc., at a cost of $17,200.

“Results were presented, however, council did not implement the findings of the survey at that time,” she wrote.

During the meeting, Marquardt said she needed more information from council members to guide her with regard to any further direction.

Responding to her request for guidance, Hicks said: “So there’s a lot of info in there; I’ll be honest, I didn’t get through it all.”

He said that while he found value in the cities within the study with which Whitewater was compared, he wanted to amend the parameters of any future studies to include at least four communities that were in the same geographic area as Whitewater, and were more similar in size.

Hicks said his only ask was that staff look at wage and benefit numbers to ensure that they are “relatively close” to those offered by other, neighboring communities.

If they are close, he said, “I think we are ok.” Otherwise, he said, he wondered if salary and benefits packages might be a part of why employees were leaving. “If this is part of the reason, maybe, I think, we need another fix,” he said. 

Allen said he didn’t want to spend another $20,000 to $25,000 on another survey.

Marquardt said she believed the cost of a new study would be closer to $50,000, and she cited a study, which, she said, was performed this year in Sheboygan, at a cost of $70,000.

“Obviously we are not that large, but it won’t be cheap,” she said.

Marquardt said numbers provided to council members were from the Cities and Villages Mutual Insurance Company (CVMIC).

She said the company responded to the city’s “ask” of “what they could do for us.”

Would the council ask for additional information, Marquardt asked: “What is the scope that you are asking for?” 

Hicks said he thought comparatives provided were based largely on “a director level.”

“I guess I’m also just curious about the day-to-day laborers,” he said, adding that he would like to see “more of a mix.”

Dawsey Smith asked about changes in a review process applied to positions, which, she said, were moving away from a “step system” to one, she said, which was currently being employed. Within the new structure, she asked if a rotation “timeframe” had been put in place, which identified which positions within the city were being reviewed and when.

Said Weidl: “Prior to Sara coming in, the best way I can say it is we weren’t adhering to that.” 

According to her online LinkedIn profile, Marquardt was hired as the city’s human resources manager in April.

Said Marquardt: “So, as a backup just a little bit, (former finance director) Steve (Hatton) did let me know right before he left was that had been the goal; it hadn’t necessarily worked as he thought it did, or would, and we can certainly revisit getting back there.” 

Dawsey Smith suggested a new system might be more apropos if the city’s former finance director had identified the current system as one that did not work.

Hicks asked if CVMIC might not have a plan it typically shared with municipalities.

Weidl noted that CVMIC is a data collection tool. The company collects information from the communities that pay it, but, he said, he believed the information could be used to develop a system.

“Give us a couple months, because what we can do is gather the info … crank on it and do some percentage differences, and do some analysis, and try and give you guys some thoughts,” he said. 

Allen suggested that data used to create a new system should be collected from cities with populations calculated at under 10,000.

Gerber offered a list of cities from which data might be collected, including Fort Atkinson, Jefferson, East Troy, Elkhorn, Stoughton, Baraboo, and Platteville, among others. She said her list included cities that had populations of under 14,000.

Also included within the council packet was a memo from Marquardt and Jeremiah Thomas, a finance department accountant.

Within the memo, the staff members explained that in 2022, the city’s former finance director “designed to adjust the Salary Resolution salary ranges on an annual basis tied to the Expenditure Restraint Program (ERP) inflation adjustment factor issued by the State of Wisconsin.”

According to the memo, “the rational for the change, starting in 2023, was to ensure the city’s wage ranges do not fall significantly behind inflationary and market pressures. The ERP inflation adjustment set by the State of Wisconsin for 2023 was set at 8.2%, and both the Minimum and Maximum of the salary ranges were adjusted by 8%. The Finance Director felt this adjustment going forward will offer the city the greatest flexibility in recruitment and retention through a systematic and independent means of inflation protection to the wage ranges.”

Additionally, the memo stated, “This annual adjustment will help the city remain competitive in the market place. The ERP inflation adjustment to the salary resolution was independent of the 4% council approved raise for city staff. The wage increase city staff received across the board was the 4% council approved increase effective January 1, 2023.”

Since Jan.1, the memo continued, a wage adjustment was made for employees within the city’s Department of Public Works, impacting the department in its entirely, and was designed to bring new hires up to the minimum salary per the 2023 resolution, while preserving a gap between those employees and employees who have years of service and experience serving the city.   

Referencing the memo, Gerber said it appeared that as positions were posted to be filled, the wage scale would be evaluated and adjusted. 

Citing new hires, she said: “A lot of those people have already been given what appears to be in line with what current wages are when they were hired. Now in January, we will have another raise, so these groups will be receiving another one.

“I don’t have a problem with that, but I don’t know if we necessarily have to reevaluate their wage scale based on this that was just recently redone.

“My concern is the people that are not on here seem to be more of the frontline workers because those positions are staying full, and people are staying, and they don’t turn over as frequently as these mid-level manager positions or the higher ones.”

Gerber said she wanted to see more focus placed on frontline workers. She noted challenges faced by frontline employees brought about by inflation, giving them less purchasing power.

“I see some compression issues for people who have been here for 20 years, to people who are just starting, and they may only have one or two thousand dollars difference between them. I don’t feel that we are giving them credit for their working knowledge. I also see a lot of attrition going on with people absorbing duties from the vacancies, and I want to make sure everybody … that people are being at least given stipends to accommodate for the excess work,” she said. 

She added: “I wish there was a price point where we could keep everybody here, but a lot of it depends on their situations and their ability to move to larger cities. So my focus would be to try and make it so the frontline workers do not have to have two jobs to survive and work at the city.” 

Returning to the topic of wage comparisons, she said: “We are always compared to a larger city which we can never compete with that tax base. So when you pick these cities, I think that we really want to see valid comparables, and what I’d also like to get from each of those communities is a copy of their salary resolution to see what their wage ranges are.” 

Thomas said other communities have asked Whitewater for similar information and have offered to share their information with Whitewater officials.

He said the city needed to do a “stronger job” of following up with other communities and asking for a copy of information they have compiled.

City manager goals and objectives

In a memo to council, Marquardt stated that she was bringing information about the city manager’s goals, objectives and management plan before council at the request of Hicks.

She wrote: “At the February 23, 2023 common council meeting, the 2023 City Manager Plan was presented for acknowledgement. The plan listed several focus areas that the city manager would work to complete. The plan was acknowledged in open session to provide a layer of transparency for the community.”

A two-page plan, enumerating a mission statement; several “focus areas”; strategic objectives; projects; a “current situation” section, revolving around projects that were “left unfinished by the former city manager,” and a subsection titled: “Future perspective,” was included with her memo.

Directing council members to information provided in their packets,  Marquardt asked for feedback and direction.

Said Hicks: “So again, I don’t have any very specific ask; I guess just reading this over, there’s a lot … I guess I looked at it as this was the 2023 plan. We are almost getting close to three-fourths of the way through.”

Hicks asked Weidl to compile a list with summary responses indicating which of the goals were completed. 

Weidl said he would bring the requested list to the council’s first meeting scheduled in September.

Gerber requested that the city manager add to the list goals which were outlined within the city’s budget, asking which among them were still in progress and how the goals were affecting the city’s budget.

Allen asked the city clerk to add the goals-related update from the city manager to a list of future agenda items.

Gerber asked about training opportunities that were being offered to the city manager. She noted that the document in her packet indicated that the trainings were selected by the human resources department and the city manager. She asked to have the council added to the list of those making the selections.

“There were suggested modules that the body recommended at about the 90-day mark,” Dawsey Smith said in response to the selection of training opportunities for the city manager. 

Weidl said the trainings were approved by CVMIC.

“We asked them for those things when I got here,” he said. 

Competencies categories for city manager evaluation

In a memo to council, Marquardt noted that she was bringing before council information regarding competency categories for the city manager’s evaluation at the request of Gerber.

She stated that the policy and procedure to evaluate a city manager was approved during the council’s  Aug. 1 meeting.

“The policy provides a timeline for the drafting of the proposed evaluation tool and council feedback,” she wrote.

She included within the council’s packet of information “competency categories for the previous city manager evaluation,” which, she wrote, had been earlier provided to the council in June and August.

A two-page list of 18 questions, labeled: “2019 city manager performance review competencies/questions” was included in Tuesday’s packet.

Marquardt said CVMIC provided examples. She asked for feedback and direction.

Said Gerber: “When I reviewed the competency questions here that were listed … these were the ones that were provided to the prior city manager?”

Marquardt said they were.

Gerber said that as she read through the questions, “there are some parts in there that I don’t know how to capture.”

When the city manager engages in speaking opportunities, she said: “I would love to see a survey sent to those people to see how their interaction was with him when he is presenting or speaking at events.”

She envisioned a process that would provide a “followup” to the city manager’s presentation, she said, adding: “Like if he goes to GWC (Greater Whitewater Committee) or Fairhaven, or does a State of the City address, League of Municipalities, if there’s a way of them completing a survey about how they felt about his presentation, his interactions. I would like to just get that back as a council member.” 

“I never heard of that one,” Allen said.

Marquardt questioned whether anyone would fill out such a survey.

Gerber said her concept was about measuring engagement, similarly to mechanisms used to collect engagement information about other city staff members. She cited frontline workers, such as “people at the window,” and “interaction with the people upstairs.”

“I get people may not do it, but I think if we put it out electronically or Facebook, or send it to them directly, which it might take them five minutes, I don’t think we’ve really ever tried it,” she said.

Offering comments about competency, she said: “I think he should be looked at as a whole, as a city manager, and not just what management thinks, and what the council thinks.

“I would also like to see the first-line workers included. Yes, they may have a different set of questions, I think, than the mid-level managers and the upper management.”

She continued: “I know you are going to say staff usually doesn’t get to evaluate a manager. I understand that, but we’re in a different situation, we are all paid by taxpayer dollars, so I think we all have a say.” 

Said Councilwoman Brienne Brown: “On the Library Board, we were told when we asked library staff to evaluate the library director that we had to do it optionally as well as completely confidentially because of fear of retaliation, that type of thing.”

Gerber agreed that the survey would best be offered optionally, noting: “I would like to offer them the opportunity as another means to communicate if they feel they can’t go directly to HR, and they can’t go directly to council, that there is the option of a survey they can fill out.”

Said Dawsey Smith: “I would liken it to an impact survey in some regard — so asking the community about their service delivery, asking the community about their interaction with staff, in a variety of ways, and the executive, and then asking similarly on the inside, to do stay interviews and perhaps a survey.”

She said she saw the tool as one that would measure how employees feel, both about the organization’s culture holistically, and their ability to be impactful in their position.”