TITLE
Recommendation to authorize City Manager to execute an agreement with Management Partners, Inc. to provide a comprehensive and objective review of the City's current recruitment, hiring, and retention approaches; and to develop an implementation plan with recommendations to enhance the hiring and retention of a well-qualified and diverse workforce, for a period of one year, in an amount not to exceed $152,484. (Citywide)
DISCUSSION
As part of the Fiscal Year 2007 Adopted Budget, the City Manager called for an optimization study addressing the approaches the City utilizes in recruiting, hiring, and retaining a qualified, diverse City workforce. Long Beach, like other city governments nationally, is struggling to attract and retain high quality employees. This is the foundation upon which successful organizations are built. With the impending retirement of the baby-boomer generation, and the limited number of people entering the public sector labor market, the City is taking a proactive step to improve its organizational strength for the future.
By defining the operational environment today and best practice approaches, a recruitment, hiring, and retention optimization study conducted by an industry expert will provide an opportunity to increase the City's competitiveness as an employer of choice.
To have continuity of leadership and the depth of knowledge and experience essential to quality service delivery, requires an understanding of which policies, practices, structures and programs currently used in the City organization are useful to recruitment and retention, and which impair success. This includes establishing best practices that position the City to develop strength at all levels of the organization for success in the future.
A Request for Proposals for professional consulting services was advertised in January 2007, and nine firms submitted proposals in response to the RFP. One certified
Woman-Owned Business Enterprise, and no local or MBE firms submitted proposals.
The Recruitment, Hiring, and Retention Steering Committee, composed of representatives from across the organization, including the Office of the City Manager, Civil Service, Human Resources, and City departments, interviewed proposers.
Management Partners, Inc. (Management Partners), was selected as the most qualified consultant for the project.
City Council approval is being requested to enter into an agreement with Management Partners to provide the requested professional consulting services. Founded in 1994 and based in San Jose, CA and Cincinnati, OH, Management Partners is a professional management consulting firm dedicated to helping local government organizations increase their effectiveness. The firm has recently assisted the cities of San Jose, CA, Sunnyvale, CA, and the County of San Mateo with recruitment, hiring, and retention human resources implementations as well as extensive experience working with municipalities to implement related business process improvement solutions, such as the City of Long Beach code enforcement study.
Management Partners will utilize their existing knowledge of best practices in the human resources arena, supplemented by additional research about programs throughout the United States, to identify best practices in the areas of municipal recruitment, hiring, and retention. The focus will be to identify or test unique, innovative service delivery models and ideas that would be applicable in Long Beach's large and diverse community. The work includes an in-depth review of the organization and participation from all departments.
The study will document the City's existing workforce demographics compared to labor market availability and trends. In addition, the review will analyze recruitment, hiring, and retention core business practices, as well as examine internal linkages and communication between programs and across departments in providing services, and create process maps to analyze workflow. An assessment will be conducted and recommendations provided for the City to better obtain desired results for positions that are difficult to recruit for or which present other significant challenges in terms of the diversity of the workforce, retention, or other salient factors. Employee participation from both current and past employees will be an integral component of the study. The study will analyze policies and procedures utilized by the City and by other public agencies.
Lastly, the study will report results and provide an Implementation Action Plan. In addition, as a follow-up to the core study, Management Partners will prepare an assessment of the City's Human Resources functions and structure and make recommendations on changes in operations that could enhance the City's hiring and retention results.
This matter was reviewed by Assistant City Attorney Heather Mahood on May 9, 2007, and Budget and Performance Management Bureau Manager David Wodynski on May 9, 2007.
TIMING CONSIDERATIONS
City Council approval of this item is requested on May 15, 2007, in order to move forward with the project in time to receive key recommendations before the end of the calendar year 2007. With the impending retirement of the baby-boomer generation, addressing the approaches the City utilizes in recruiting, hiring, and retaining a qualified, diverse City workforce is a proactive step to improve its organizational strength for the future.
FISCAL IMPACT
The proposed agreement will not exceed a one-time amount of $152,484, which will be paid over the course of two Fiscal Years. As with past optimization studies, the cost of the study will be supported within the existing City Budget.
SUGGESTED ACTION
Approve recommendation.
Respectfully Submitted,
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APPROVED: |
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GERALD R. MILLER |
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CITY MANAGER |