MOOSE JAW — City hall’s human resources department plans to run a four-month pilot project to determine whether a temporary support position can reduce the time supervisors spend on paperwork.
During its July 22 personnel meeting, city council unanimously authorized HR services to hire a term position in the department, with funding to come from budgetary savings from reduced recruitment costs in HR and administrative savings from the operations department.
Council then unanimously approved the meeting minutes during its Aug. 12 regular meeting.
TJ Karwandy, director of HR services, told the Express that this initiative will focus on supporting supervisors in the operations department’s public works area. Typically, such supervisors have 30 to 40 ongoing reports, so their day-to-day activities — such as staffing, orientation, or training — “can eat away a lot of their time” and distract them from pursuing customer service-focused initiatives.
So, the pilot project will determine if this term position can handle those day-to-day, “procedural HR-type” activities and free up time for supervisors to focus on high-value, front-line operations.
“If you’ve got someone who’s a supervisor for streets and roads, well, they’ve got expertise in that that we’d like (them) to spend more time on that,” the HR director remarked.
The project will run from roughly September until the end of December, and if it goes well, then the HR department will bring a proposal to the 2025 budget discussions and ask council to hire a permanent, full-time support position, said Karwandy.
The term position is expected to pay up to $25,000, but that depends on how quickly the department can find someone and when the successful applicant can start, he continued.
Karwandy added that the money for this position arose because HR services budget certain costs annually, such as relocation expenses when bringing in candidates for interviews or recruitment costs when using the services of a professional headhunter. The department hasn’t spent as much money this year in those areas, so that is how it built up a small cushion of savings.
The next regular council meeting is Monday, Aug. 26.
