Nothing like crazy New York weather. We boarded the train in Albany for the Annual NY Towns Association Conference to a frigid -18 degrees, and two days later returned home to a soggy 58 degrees.

But the weather wasn’t the only dynamic event taking place. Benetech joined the ranks of New York state’s towns and villages staffers and elected officials for annual training at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The event boasted a strong crowd of more than 1200 attendees and nearly 90 exhibitor booths, with training session topics ranging from energy management to drone commercialization to record keeping.

Around the Benetech booth, however, the topic of conversation was municipal workforce management processes, and how to make the transition from the paper punch cards to biometric time clocks, and evolve from spreadsheet management to integrated payroll and automated report writers.

In our conversations, two trends surfaced regarding the current state of affairs for town and village workforce management.

1. The mid-size municipal market is grossly underserved by workforce providers.

We were shocked (but also pleasantly surprised) that of the nearly 100 exhibitors at the NY Towns and Villages Conference that we were the only provider of Payroll, HRIS, and Time Tracking software and services.

One clerk stated, “Payroll is too complicated to outsource. We have employees that work a portion of the day at one pay rate, then jump in a truck to plow the highways at another rate.” She further spoke of their complex collective bargaining agreements, and the inflexibility of workforce solution providers to conform to their processes.

In my opinion, I think she hit the nail on the head. It’s easier and less cost restrictive to bring on a new private sector client that conforms to a vendor’s “model company”. Towns and villages have similar needs, but, unlike the private sector, rarely are they operating according to standard industry practices. Digging into the CBA’s and often-antiquated in-house systems and spreadsheets can be more work than the standard payroll provider is looking to invest.

2. The mid-size municipal market is tragically unaware of what the next generation of workforce technology has to offer.

At the 2016 Conference, there was no course on improved workforce management automation, but the conference did offer an Introduction to Spreadsheet Management seminar. Indeed a great and needed skill that every clerk needs to master. But what’s beyond the sea of spreadsheets? The Excel gurus will be the first to tell you, they are buried in spreadsheets.

I don’t state this to point any fingers of condemnation, but rather use this story as a means of checking the pulse on our current understanding of municipal workforce management best practices. There are some great new robust and affordable workforce systems on the market today, and they aren’t just for the benefit of private sector employers.

Learn more about Benetech’s Integrated Workforce Management Product

Modern systems have the ability to build the labor distribution and cost-allocation profiles to assign employee hours to multiple departments: both by auto-allocation or a clock-in/out basis. Telephony hook-ups and mobile applications with GPS restrictions allow employees to change departments on the go. Employee self-service systems further cut-down on administrator data management and streamline communication and accounting workflows.

Paid time-off tracking and automated accruals are additional time-saving workforce system features that better control costs and help municipalities avoid overtime, and costs associated with paid absences. A 2013 Forbes article reported that unscheduled absenteeism costs roughly $3600 per year for hourly workers (which included wages paid to absent employees, high-cost of replacement workers, and administrative costs of managing absenteeism).

One new feature that many town supervisors, we learned, have begun pursuing is better time-clock systems. Many town supervisors shared collectively an increased concern over their current employee time-tracking systems and procedures. Specifically, they were looking into biometric time clocks as a means of combatting buddy-punching and stealing time. One supervisor reported that time-stealing had grown so customary that employees flagrantly did so in front of supervisors.

What’s the State of Your Municipal Workforce?

It’s a question worth asking. We knew one town that had a clerk retiring after 45 years of service, and they had no idea what she did on a daily basis. For her final two weeks, they tasked her with writing down in a journal every hour what she’d done for the previous 60 minutes. No processes were in place, just a person.

Now, most municipalities are not in quite as fragile of circumstances, but perhaps the next step is investigating some of the different options at your disposal.