Monterey County Grand Jury • 2019-2020

Human Resources Building and Maintaining a Productive Workforce,

Published: June 03, 2020 28 pages
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Findings and Recommendations 6 findings

F1
As evidenced by interviews, the current level of vacant health care positions has a direct and negative impact on the County by reducing the County’s ability to deliver community disease control and prevention outreach, and to provide adequate Public Health case management activities. This also creates an undue burden on the remaining staff that leads to job burnout.
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
The “Compensation Philosophy” should be updated to reflect appropriate and comparable counties and cities for each job classification. This update should be completed in six months. 10
F2
Critical positions such as public health nurse practitioners, psychiatric social workers, environmental health specialists, and physicians are not being filled in a timely manner. 9
Related Recommendations (1)
R2
County Human Resources should engage an experienced compensation consultant to assist in the creation of a transparent and global compensation and classification program. This should be completed in three months.
F3
Human Resources staffing levels in some Departments are insufficient to maintain optimum staffing levels.
Related Recommendations (1)
R3
Budgeted positions should be posted in a timely manner giving priority to posting positions that affect the health and safety of County residents. This posting should occur
F4
Current County personnel vacancy levels and rates of hire confirm that recruitment has not been occurring at an optimal level in either the centralized or the decentralized departments.
Related Recommendations (1)
R4
Open positions should be proactively advertised of an employment vacancy or upon notice of retirement, transfer, or resignation to avoid reduction of essential public services, departmental job burnout, and overtime or temporary hiring expense.
F5
The compensation plan (currently called “Compensation Philosophy”) in use by Monterey County is outdated; the list of public agencies used for “market survey” comparison was last updated in 1989, more than 30 years ago.
Related Recommendations (1)
R5
Each budget cycle should include specific opportunities for department heads to identify and justify specific referral and hiring bonuses for their hard-to-fill positions. This process should begin of the date of this report.
F6
As discussed in interviews, on-line learning systems may provide critical on- demand training, but they cannot replace the human interaction that occurs in person-to-person training, which supports job satisfaction.
Related Recommendations (1)
R6
In order to ensure an adequate staffing level for essential County public health workers, the County should begin a process to identify supplemental funding sources to mitigate un-forecast budget shortfalls in federal and state grants, aid, or other direct program funding. This analysis should be completed in 30 days.

Additional Recommendations 2

These recommendations are not explicitly linked to specific findings.

No Responses Found 2

Government entities assigned to respond to this report. No response documents have been linked in our database.

Monterey County Board of Supervisors Elected County Office
Monterey County Office of Education Agency