Show Notes
It's summertime and the living's easy. Well not quite… but we are trying out a new program in Hanover and I wanted to share that with you.
As many of you may know if you keep up on our podcast, we are doing an intensive, employee-driven staffing study right now. We are just about in month three of a total of six months. By the end, we'll have had something like 70 or 80 small group discussions with our staff, reviewing everything from how departments determine needs and set goals, to what kind of benefits we offer, how we onboard people, and just about everything else involved in working here in Hanover.
We're doing this because labor markets are changing, and governments generally are not especially well prepared to shift our practices along with these changes, and we're already seeing some persistent vacancies and service level impacts. One of the things we're looking at is how to make the workplace a supportive, dare I say humane place, and in many workplaces especially over the last few years, we've lost that thread, with fewer staff performing the same or a higher level of work, even as high inflation cuts into salaries and purchasing power. We're collecting feedback from our nearly 200 total employees here in Hanover, and starting to make small changes and queue up broader changes in the coming months and years to help make Hanover a true employer-of choice in the coming years.
One way we're doing that is looking at summer hours. The goal here is to provide every employee with some amount of time during the standard work week that they aren't scheduled for work. Meaning, that people should be able to go to other things that are typically only open during the standard work week (doctors, banks, etc) without having to burn their time off. Some departments with shift schedules or differing hours already have this built in, but many don't. We explored a few different options of how to set this up, including having late nights, and early days, four 9 or 10 hour days, and a few others. What we landed on that worked best for most employees are slight variations from different departments and I describe that below so you can be aware what departments are open when. It's not radically different from what we have in place normally, and we have these schedules posted on our website too. This is a great pilot to see what works or what doesn't, and we'll review at the end of the summer how things worked and make recommendations for the future.
We have a tremendously hard working staff here in Hanover, and I'm happy to bring a slight slow down and pressure relief over the summer so that people can get back into work well rested and happy and do the best work possible for all of you, our community.
Find the schedules online at Hanovernh.org.
Town Hall
Building hours:
Monday - Thursday 8am - 430pm
Friday 8 – 1pm. Building closed after 1pm on Friday
Police
Officers at-large
Normal shift schedule
Chief, Captain, and Lieutenants
Rotating 4-day work week (Same coverage as currently)
Admin
4-day week with most Fridays off
Parking
Normal schedule
Fire
Normal shift schedule
Admin
4-day work week with Fridays off
DPW
Highway and line maintenance
Rotating 4-day work week days (same coverage)
Fleet
Normal schedule
Water
Rotating 4-day week (same coverage)
Wastewater
Normal schedule
Custodial
Flexible rotating schedule
Building
Normal schedule
Howe
Normal schedule
Etna
Normal schedule
Parks and Rec
OST
4-day rotating basis (same coverage).
Program
Staff will work four nine-hour days per week. Friday will be a half day, working 8-12.
Grounds:
Moving one hour earlier - their schedule will be: Monday-Friday 6am – 2:30pm.
