Recently the county commissioners took what most are calling a historic step for government agencies and approved merit raises totaling $115,816 for 96 non-union employees, under the commissioners’ direct control. Usually in government just hanging around another year gets you more pay, but Commission President Don Dixon said that is no longer the case in Butler County.
“I think it levels the playing field for trying to reward our employees for work performance… I think it really will have and has had a huge impact on the county general fund. It’s an excellent tool for us to use, it’s good for the taxpayers, it’s good for our employees and our supervisors,” he said. “The harder you work, the better job you do, the more value you have to the company. We are trying to adopt that same philosophy.”
Human Resources Director Jim Davis said 96 people out of 193 eligible employees got raises in the one- to four-percent range. There were 46 Butler County Care Facility and 28 Children Services employees who were deemed ineligible because of budget constraints.
Children Services recently announced a $4 million budget deficit for 2014 — they have already erased about half that amount — and the Care Facility has had a difficult time balancing its budget. Dixon said the days are gone when pay hikes were automatic.
“When you have a situation where you can’t pay your bills, there has to be a time to balance the books…,” Dixon said. “If there is no money, you can’t give it away.”
Officials have estimated erasing compounded raises in 2008 saved the county $7.5 million, and the new compensation program will save about $18.5 million over 10 years. Dixon campaigned long and hard to get a salary survey done to gauge where some previous double-digit, runaway raises placed the county, compared to other governments and the private sector.
It took Commissioner Cindy Carpenter joining the board to get the $100,000 study approved. In 2011, the county determined 42 of the 144 non-union employees under the commissioners’ control were overpaid and 14 others were underpaid.
In the wake of the initial Clemans Nelson survey and a subsequent update in 2014, pay scales went from around 125 to the current 13. Of the 96 people who received merit raises, 26 were paid a lump sum as opposed to a percentage increase to their base pay, because of the new salary ranges.
Only one employee, Jason Scott, who is the “number two guy” in the IT department, got the full four percent increase, and the majority 34, got a two-percent pay hike. The commissioners approved a two percent pool of performance pay money in the 2015 budget, and the managers handed out raises based on new performance evaluations. Davis said the range prevents any employee from getting a giant increase.
“That’s why we limit the range from one to four percent; it’s just to basically exercise that authority of keeping them all within close proximity,” he said. “I’m not going to lie, as a manager and a believer in performance pay, we wouldn’t mind seeing that range zero to 10 percent. The reason is if we’ve got a great employee that we want to reward and to retain, we would like to be able to give them as much as possible.”
Conspicuously absent from the raise list is County Administrator Charlie Young. His $125,000 annual salary hasn’t changed since he was hired almost three years ago. Dixon said the commissioners are still working on a raise for Young, gathering comparable data from other governmental entities and executives in the private sector. But he said Young most likely will get a pay bump.
“Charlie came in and I think he understood we needed to right the ship and knew what the finances were, and his priorities were not monetary,” Dixon said. “He wants to make certain, as we do also, that we lead by example. Our priorities were to get everybody else taken care of, and then take care of top administration.”
Many of the other office holders told the commissioners during budget hearings they already employ performance pay raises for non-union employees. But nearly all of the county’s unions have all balked at espousing the merit raises. Eleven unions that recently renegotiated their contracts went for the $550 lump sum the county offered. The clerk of courts union employees took a $75 lump-sum payment and a 2.5 percent pot of money to be distributed for merit raises.
Children Services is still at odds with the county over it’s contract, but the last known offer included a performance pay component.
The union offered to take a $550 lump sum retroactive to July 2013, a two percent across-the-board raise in year two and a one percent across-the-board increase in year three of the contract. There was also a two percent pool of money available for pay-for-performance in the third year. It would have cost the county an extra $523,280.
The paraprofessional union workers at the Developmental Disabilities Board recently sealed their deal with the county and their representative Chauncey Mason, executive director of the Professional Guild of Ohio, said they rejected the notion of performance pay because of a concern about fairness.
“Whenever you’ve got human beings involved in a process you have the potential for unfairness, so until they can come up with an absolutely fair process for doing it, we’re going to be concerned about management abuses…,” he said. “If the workers are performing satisfactorily and their attendance is within reasonable standards, then they’ll get a raise. What more do you need? I guess they want everybody to be Superman.”
Mason and some other union chiefs in the county have expressed concerns over what was presented in terms of how the performance measurements would work, hence the hesitance. Miami University Professor of Management Joshua Schwarz said it is relatively easy to measure performance when someone is producing a product that can be counted, but the human factor does play a role.
“If what the employee does is a little more vague, something that can’t easily be counted, then performance tends to be defined as a judgment made by a supervisor about how well they’re performing,” he said. “Once you get in the area of human judgment then there is the possibility of bias occurring.”
Young argued that supervisors might like someone better and score them higher because they are excellent performers. He added that the argument often made, that politics could also come into play and skew fair raises, is another “farcical” argument that is no more than a smoke screen.
“At the very core and belief of unions as I understand it is everyone should be treated the same,” he said. “I find that to be abhorrent. Everyone doesn’t deserve to be treated the same, they deserve to be treated fairly. And treating them the same is an extremely unfair way to treat people.”
Stacie Holloway, associate professor and director of Undergraduate Programs in Organizational Leadership and Human Resources at the University of Cincinnati, said it is understandable there would be push-back from unions on the issue of merit pay, because their entire personality is about equality. However, she said the people paying the bills probably think differently.
“The advantage of the merit based system from a taxpayer’s standpoint is if my taxes are going to Butler County, I want to make sure those tax dollars are used wisely,” Holloway said. “If there are people on the job who are not performing, I want there to be some accountability for that. The reverse of that is if there are people where my investment is really paying off, I would want to reward and incent that type of behavior.”
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