The 5 Keys For Utility Workforces
It seems that now is a crucial time for the country’s workforce. Concerns around dwindling opportunities for the country’s workers seem to propel changes in governmental leadership and the threat of increased automation looms on the horizon. But, at least for now, jobs in the drinking water and wastewater treatment sectors remain at a premium.
Even though operations are increasingly automated in the space, these operations are still in dire need of new labor. In a sector largely staffed by soon-to-retire Baby Boomers, the time to focus on staff retention and recruitment has come.
To help drinking water utilities with their staffing needs, the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and Syracuse University’s Environmental Finance Center (EFC) invited concerned utilities to attend their webinar, “Workforce Development: An Overview of Key Components.”
The presentation was led by Khris Dodson, the associate director of the EFC. He took attendees through several key areas of focus, providing actionable tips for attracting necessary talent, retaining critical employees, and preparing for the succession of retiring labor in the water and wastewater treatment space.
Dodson, who condensed a typical six-hour training sessions into a single hour, focused on language and the importance of effectively communicating with the public, new hires, and current employees as a common thread throughout the webinar.
“When we talk about workforce development and recruitment and retention of employees, how do we talk about our jobs? How do we talk about ourselves and how does that reflect on our ability to recruit and retain employees?” Dodson asked attendees. “How do we get others excited about water?”
As Dodson ventured into the details of his presentation, excitement around water was a preeminent theme.
- Flexible Recruitment
As Dodson focused on the difficult task of recruiting new employees to replace those leaving the sector, he cited a New York Water Environment Association survey of 300 operators that found a technical background in science, engineering, technology, and math; aptitude with computers and software; and personal characteristics like ambition and reliability to be the most critical characteristics for new hires to possess.
“This is just one survey, but it is an indicator of what some operators think the needs are and where they think that the industry’s going,” Dodson said. “I challenge you to ask yourself a few questions in your recruitment … Are you getting a lot of responses? Are you getting quality responses? What changes will you have to make to recruit the talent you need?”
With many operators identifying technical savvy as an ideal skill, Dodson recommended recruiting potential hires online. He also recommended adjusting compensation packages to reflect the priorities of younger applicants and remaining flexible when a good candidate appears.
“Understanding that maybe you have the right person but maybe not at the right time or the right position hasn’t opened up,” Dodson said. “So maybe both you and the applicant become a little nimble on how the job begins or evolves.”
- Highlight The Industry’s Unique Benefits
The water treatment industry is a unique space that presents many advantages to its employees. But new hires might not be aware of these benefits. Dodson recommended highlighting them in recruitment messages and job postings as a way of enticing candidates and filling labor gaps.
He noted the societal importance of clean water, relative job stability, and the plethora of professional organizations in the space as key points to promote.
“All these things are recruitment tools, are ways to sell a job, to sell our industry to people who we may be trying to attract,” said Dodson.
- Feedback For Current Employees
In addition to his recruitment tips, Dodson stressed a list of programs that can be offered to current employees to keep them satisfied and help them better prepare for retiring colleagues and supervisors. Among this advice was a call to engage in continual evaluations that regularly set goals for employees and ensure they get met.
“The review performance should be a continual process, not something where you only sit down once a year, fill out a form, and agree to goals,” Dodson said. “Offer some kind of feedback along the way. If you wait a year to say, ‘This didn’t work out,’ then that’s too long… Sometimes people are working great, but they’re just not necessarily in the role where they’re going to work at their best.”
- Improve The Work Environment
A vital employee recruitment method, said Dodson, is to make the work environment as appealing and comfortable for employees as possible.
“What’s your work environment like? Is everybody comfortable?” Dodson asked attendees. “We recognize that this industry can often make people quite uncomfortable out in cold weather, dealing with water, in trenches, in pits, getting muddy, and dirty, and cold, and iced over. Why can’t we try to make them as comfortable as possible when they’re not doing that?”
Among specific methods that Dodson floated were a focus on attractive workplaces that employees can take pride in, recognizing labor with “operator of the month awards,” praise when continuing education courses are completed, and sponsoring participation in regional operations challenges.
- Prepare For Succession
In the final section of the webinar, Dodson focused on succession planning. In this industry, it is a given that vital employees will soon be leaving and taking their years of experience and knowledge with them. That’s why it is necessary for utilities to have an actionable succession plan in place, something that 58 percent of the webinar attendees said they did not have.
“It’s not just a person leaving, it’s not just a vacant position,” said Dodson. “It’s all that institutional knowledge, all that training, all of those internal and external relationships that the person had.”
Dodson recommended two ways of approaching this planning. Utilities can build replacement works to ensure continuity when someone leaves and they can conduct a “gap analysis” that will project needs based on retirements in the coming years or decades. He also stressed the importance of lateral succession and the opportunity that departing labor gives an operation to reconsider job descriptions and where real needs are.
“You also want to think about redundancy across your team, so no one position becomes too vulnerable to one person’s retirement,” Dodson said. “Ways to do that are cross-training, getting people to learn different jobs, so a lab tech can also do another job, an operator can also do other jobs.”