2023 Top 5 Public Sector HR Trends

Welcome everyone to our public sector HR trends webinar. This is our annual webinar. We're always super excited to do this. All the data presented today was a result of a HR trends survey that we sent out to people like yourself. If you participated, thank you so much. We did have over seven hundred responses. So we're excited to report on those insights from you guys and provide some best practices. So as you can see on your screen, you should have a panel. On that panel, you can control your audio if you're having issues with that. You also can utilize the chat section. We encourage you guys to submit comments and questions. We will have a Q and A section at the end, so we would love to have questions submitted from you throughout the presentation that we can address at the end. That's perfect. Go ahead and use that. Last note is to keep an eye out tomorrow for a follow-up email. The recording of the presentation, the slides, and some further information will be included on that so you can share it with people and refer back to this. So let's go ahead and welcome our speakers today. My name is Vanessa. I'm on the marketing team. I help put together these virtual events. We have Mr. Aaron Bingham, our VP of sales. He works with our existing customers to give you guys the tools to succeed. And then we have one of our newest members of the neodev team, Reed Walsh. She is our chief human resources officer and she was a former deputy secretary of human resources and management for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. So we're excited to have her on board and we're excited to have her industry insights. So I'm gonna go ahead and pass the mic over to Erin. Thank you, Vanessa. So excited to be here. Welcome everyone. This is a fantastic time of year for us, just gathering a lot of the insights that we pulled together over this past year to share them back with you and be a resource to you as we partner with you today and moving forward. Each year, as Vanessa mentioned, we survey our government HR customers to gain insights into the trends facing them for the new year. And we like to put these into a trend report that summarizes all this data and provides valuable analysis and research back to you and provides recommendations for how you want to navigate those challenges going into the new year. But before we get into our survey and our results, we wanted to take a minute to see what's on the top of your minds for what are your top priorities for twenty twenty three. So Vanessa is going to trigger a poll question for us here and we'd like you to select the top three initiatives or priorities for you from this poll and get an idea of where you are all at today. So if you can go ahead and make your clicks there and we will share the poll results back with you here momentarily. Always exciting to jump into a poll right out of the gate and the webinar, people participating and having a good time. All right, so interesting enough, we have recruiting coming in at the top of the charts there. And then just behind it at nineteen percent retention, which plays in nicely with the topics for today. We know that we're all battling in terms of recruiting and looking for opportunity to keep folks around and keep them excited about working at our agencies. So thank you for participating in the poll, if we can go next slide. I'd like to talk a little bit about where we got the data that we'll be sharing with you today. So as Vanessa mentioned, we went ahead and surveyed many of you. We had over seven twenty five folks participate in these surveys. Those folks included many of the titles that we have on our webinar today. So HR generalists, HR directors, managers, recruiters, and we surveyed cities, counties, local state governments, and many other types of agencies to come up with some of these trends that we're going to go ahead and cover today. So let's go ahead and take a look at what those top priorities look like. So from that survey, very similar to what we saw today, the top priority was in fact recruiting as well as retention. So as we look over the past couple of years in the public sector, we've faced a hiring crisis with unprecedented employee turnover. And today's polls results underscore that it's more of the same, right? We're gonna look to see these same challenges continue into twenty twenty three with recruiting and retention towering over the other priorities. These two trends will remain a key focus for both state and local governments this year. So let's go ahead and take a closer look at some strategies to help address these two top topics of recruiting and retention. So we're gonna go ahead and start with the big one, recruitment. And so excited to welcome Reid in to tackle this obstacle for us or this opportunity, I should say. So without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to Reid and she's gonna take us through that. Hi, thanks everybody, glad to be here. So recruitment was identified not only in our survey, but in our our just our poll here is one of the top issues and, you know, for absolutely good reason. In twenty twenty two compared to twenty twenty one, applicants per job were down fifty six percent. So it comes to no surprise that all of us are identifying that seventy two percent of the respondents of the survey included that as one of their top three priorities in twenty twenty three. So some of the top recruiting challenges. Competition for talent will only increase in the coming years. Just in January of this year, the US job market added over five hundred thousand jobs in January alone. That put us at a fifty year, low for unemployment rates. So this is something that you're you're saying is gonna be a challenge for you, and that's validated by our surveys and also by what's going on, you know, from the DOL reporting. So sixty three percent of government HR expects to competition for qualified candidates. I think qualified is a is a big word for all of us, you know, getting into the retention topic later, in twenty twenty three. Fifty eight percent expect that, scarce talent and labor shortages are going to continue. They're going to continue for the the next two years. But population data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics implies that it could be longer. So next slide. So talent shortage. You can see that eminent retiree fifty five plus line. By twenty thirty, all baby boomers sixty five plus and population entering the workforce age twenty four to sixteen won't be able to compensate for the exodus of retirees. I think we all feel that. I think we all have fear of single person dependencies, let alone, you know, when those retirees will happen to sit in a certain area. It's a real fear, and it's definitely going to, you know, result in labor shortages. So what do we need to do? What do we need to do as HR professionals? What do we have in our toolkit to help us with our recruiting efforts? One of the most powerful things we can do is understand what the candidates care about most. So this chart shows the average of all respondents rankings on a scale of one to six about what matters. Everybody wants a competitive paycheck, and I know we all deal with that in our own environments. You know, our ability to influence that, you know, can be spotty at times. So while we may not have as much pay as the private sector, there are other things that candidates care about that we can really focus in on where we have a true advantage: work life balance, benefits, fulfillment in your work. We used to say in the Commonwealth, working for the Commonwealth is working for the common good, and people, you know, they truly do believe that, so that resonates. Development opportunities and culture. You know, one of the things that's a part of your recruitment strategy, you want to be sure to talk about these non monetary benefits of working at your organization. And in my experience, you also wanna have your hiring managers really well versed in in those as well, focusing on work life balance, better benefits. It's the key to attracting new talent. So what are some other creative ways we can attract more applicants? So when we're thinking about, you know, different ways to attack issues, one of the things that we want to highlight here is there's very little interest in hiring baby boomers, right? That's six percent, and retirees about five percent. And this is a challenge, but it also could present an interesting opportunity. So think about retirees being a good fit for part time or temporary positions. When I was at the Commonwealth, I kept saying, we're having extreme turnover in these unemployment comp call centers. This is really brutal work for eight hours a day. Why are we not thinking about part time opportunities? You know, potentially people who have dependents who, you know, want to be able to get them off to school or whatever they may be engaging in, but they can be there, you know, for a good five, six hours of quality work before they need to pick up their domestic responsibilities. So thinking about this in different ways, and we have a real opportunity at this moment to do that. So let's explore some other ways and to make sure that we are inventive and honing in on what candidates care about. So I think we have a poll question right now to kind of go into this topic. So what new things are you trying in your environment? Okay, let's see how what we're seeing here matches up to our research. So government HR professionals are trying new and innovative things to fill vacancies. You know, it's sort of a must in our industry. The top of the list are hybrid work fifty percent. That's identified in our poll results as well as being a high priority. Tuition reimbursement at thirty eight percent when we did the global poll. That seems like it's about the third priority in terms of who's on the call today. Employee referral programs, signing bonuses, you know, looking for opportunities, you know, where that may work for you. These are all things that are new ways to think about how we're attracting the talent. So here at NeoGov, you know, the team is always thinking of new ways and new strategies for boosting recruitment. So on your screen right now, and I know these are going to be sent out, are some additional resources that we put together to help you build a more effective recruiting strategy in twenty twenty three. So I think the reciprocal to recruitment definitely is retention, and Erin's going to present on that. All right, thank you so much, Reid. Excited to jump into the next topic for twenty twenty three. What's on everybody's mind is obviously we need to go out and find new people. We don't have enough folks in our agencies today. But one of the things that's gonna help us out with finding new people is retaining our new existing folks so we don't have to go out and find as many folks to replace those individuals. So excited to jump into this. So obviously very competitive job market, retention couldn't be more top of mind right now. Sixty five percent of government HR professionals felt the same way, citing it as one of their top three priorities as we mentioned in the results earlier in our poll here at the tail end of the year. So taking a look at those priorities once again, if I could get next slide there. You saw retention coming in there at number two at sixty five percent. So I don't think it's a big surprise why retention is so important or so top of mind, wanted to kind of explore a few things a little bit further with each of you. According to SHRM, I found this fact really, really interesting. Each employee departure costs about one third of that person's annual pay. So think about that for a minute, right? So you lose a person, you lose an employee, an individual, it costs about one third of that individual's annual play to get them replaced, right? So it's a high cost for turnover. Higher retention requires less recruitment resources and save money, obviously, right? Going back to what we just mentioned there from SHRM. Improving retention is addressing the root cause instead of the symptom, right? So how do we get ahead of it before it comes back to bite us? With the ongoing labor drought retention will matter more than ever before as we talked about. And increasing retention, one of the biggest things that we need to do to increase retention is to know more about what our employees care about, right? We talked about as it relates to recruiting, what do they care about as we're trying to bring them in the front door? What do they care about in terms of staying and sticking around? So we're gonna go ahead and jump into that. So the dollars are always gonna be top of mind, right? You're never gonna move away from that. That's always gonna be the key driver. But as Reid mentioned with recruiting, there's also losses that are more scarce today on the retention side, right? So provided raises and bonuses will always impact retention, but in lieu of finding new ways to increase pay, improving agency culture is a practical and reliable way to reduce turnover. The reality is that almost every item listed here impacts culture, right? So think about it, work life balance, better benefits, fulfillment and work, agency culture, right? It's all tied back to it. So focusing on the other or the, you know, the non dollars is forty seven percent of what we found here from the poll, will help us reduce the turnover. From here, let's go ahead and take a look at why public sector employees are leaving according to our poll. So the number one reason, similar to what we saw before, is again going back to higher paid opportunities, but there's a lot to be said for all the other reasons that you see here on the screen, right? So, you know, poor management, changing career paths, limited development. Let's talk a little bit more about that. The top reason higher paying jobs, as I mentioned, come this as no surprise. Many other reasons go back to culture, right? So poor management, limited development of opportunities, lack of work flexibility can all be addressed in potential policy and process changes. So in our survey, we were surprised by the number of respondents that mentioned the high cost of housing line for us right now. We know that you're facing, many of their employees mentioned that they had a difficult time commuting and covering the cost of commuting because of the high housing prices. And it precluded them from living in a location where they worked, right? So this is one example of why you might consider utilizing employee surveys and exit interviews to hone in on factors specific to your organization so that you can start mitigating these factors to improve retention, right? So if the commuting is difficult for the employees, if the cost is too high, going back to kind of that hybrid work that we just talked about might be a good opportunity for the agency. So if I go next slide, I'm gonna talk a little bit about becoming more employee focused. So we talked about the first one of surveys and exit interviews as being an excellent opportunity to gather feedback of why folks just aren't sticking around, why the agency is not working out with them, for them. But the key there is not waiting until they leave, right? Being able to be proactive whether it's during your performance reviews or just check ins, weekly one on ones and really asking your folks why they choose to stay or what potentially would cause them to leave. So talking a little bit further about culture, according to Columbia University, fifty seven percent of employees at high culture organizations were very satisfied with their jobs and only fourteen percent were likely to leave. Conversely, only seven percent of employees at low culture organizations were satisfied with their jobs and a whopping forty eight percent were very likely to leave. So that culture just really impacts us in a big way. Happy employees are twelve percent more productive according to a study by the University of Warwick. So let's talk a little bit about technology now, right? By using technology, obviously we can improve operations, we scale, but potentially we can do a lot more with less resources. And where we have resources that are more scarce today in terms of employees, being able to make that pivot allows for us to adjust and scale and get our organization in a better place that has a trickle down effect on the culture of the organization. Think about the last time that you hired somebody in and you onboarded them, what that process looked like. Did you have technology to support that? Did they give them a good right step in the right direction as they came into the agency that they were excited about being there? Did the technology meet them kind of where they're at in terms of Gen Z and Millennial and whatnot? So as a technology provider for government HR, retention is top of mind for us right now. We know that you're facing a lot of challenges and we're really excited about, you know, being able to provide some of these resources for you to look at new strategies to improve your retention. So if I could go next slide. So similar as Reid showed you with recruiting and some best practices that we can provide to you, we have some really great content on retention. So we have the trends review that we're going to be sharing back with you. We also have another article, Leveraging Employee Performance Evaluation Tools to Boost Retention. And then the last one that I love is How to Boost Your Recruitment Retention and Workplace Culture, which is a fantastic piece that we put out recently. You might be wondering about the other three trends of the five trends. I wanted to touch on those right here for you. So when we surveyed our folks, we found out that not only was retention and recruiting top of the list, but the other trends were operational efficiency, succession planning, and then overall employee development. We obviously chose to focus on the top two today being top of mind and so much ahead of the pack in terms of what was on your minds for twenty twenty three. But these other three trends will be addressed in that content that we're gonna be provided back to you. So outside of the resources and then the links that you're gonna have delivered to you after the end of this webinar, We've also put together a HR Trends Resource Center that you can access via our website, and you'll have that information, the email coming to you, that'll help you really start to think through some different strategies, getting outside of the box, getting outside of your day to day and how you're going about things to get ahead of some of these different obstacles or opportunities that you have in front of you in order to improve your retention, your recruiting and some of those other things that we mentioned. So thank you so much for joining today. Hopefully this was insightful for you. Before we wrap up, we wanted to take a few minutes to address any questions that we might have from all of our partners joining us on the webinar today. And so you can go ahead and utilize the chat function in the webinar if you'd like to pop a couple questions over and we'd love to address those live with you as well as go ahead and provide this content back to you once we wrap today's webinar. Awesome. So yeah, let's go ahead and answer a couple questions. The first one that we got, somebody asked, How do we get candidates to see the value of non monetary benefits? Absolutely. Yeah, so it really starts with who you're seeking, right? When you think about the different type of candidates that you're going after, there's gonna be some folks that are just gonna put dollars first and they're not really gonna get around that, right? But there's gonna be some other folks that are a little bit more interested or more open to some of the other benefits that we talked about before, right? So think about your approach with recruiting, think about your job posts, think about the way that you're reaching out to candidates and what are you marketing to them, right? You think about millennials or those Gen Z folks, they really, really focus on work life balance more so than the baby boomers and some of the older folks in the workforce. And so thinking about that and prioritizing those types of things, work life balance, hybrid work, maybe you do in the summers, you work four days versus five with adjustment in hours. And some of those things are gonna be so much more appealing to that younger workforce than you would really think when coming into traditional private sector jobs, they're potentially not gonna have that same kind of flexibility. And then Reid mentioned, the ability to kind of have a sense of ownership and giving back. That also resonates really, really strong with today's younger workforce is they wanna have a sense of accomplishment, a sense that they have purpose in their job, and that they're really helping the communities around them. And so going back to how you recruit, what does your interview look like, what do your job postings look like, being able to highlight a lot of those things that you think are gonna resonate well, kinda addressing that forty seven percent that we looked at. Only half of what they were looking for were the dollars. The other half had to do with culture, work life balance, and a lot of things that you can control. And that might be just a slight adjustment in some process or policy that allows you to do that. Great question. Hey, Erin, if I can add to that, you know, one of the things that I found really helpful, you know, was kind of understanding, you know, the ability of our tools. And, you know, we did some total rewards videos and that sort of thing, which were great. But as we were posting jobs, and as we were contacting employees or applicant tracking system, what kind of things were we sending them to? We're adding a link to our YouTube video that showed that. Did we need for these internship programs to make sure we drew their eyes specifically in our comms or directly in our job posting to some videos that, you know, give them the feel good stuff. So, you know, creating that content is actually pretty simple. It doesn't have to be long. It just needs to kind of explain these benefits and using the tools that you have to insert, you know, even just a picture or something like that, that kind of is tailored to the person that you're doing the job posting for. That's huge. Tailoring the job posting is really big. I also found that like the key to success with this is education with the hiring managers, right? At the end of the day, they're doing a lot of these interviews. They're doing a lot of this stuff. So how are we equipping them with this information? I think it's a really helpful strategy. Awesome. Yeah, let's go ahead and move to another question. We got the question in regards to that Columbia University study. They were asking if we could describe the difference between high culture versus low culture and how we can foster that. Foster that. Absolutely. Reid, do you wanna talk about maybe some of the things that you did with culture with your past organization and then I can jump on the back end of your comments? Yeah, I'm gonna apologize in advance for the background noise that I have. I'm a little bit in motion right now, yeah, I I think culture is huge, right? And for me in Pennsylvania, are in a shared services environment. So we were doing a lot of this stuff for lots of different people who wanted to preserve their culture. So I think being respectful of the fact that we have this huge job to do for a variety of things, and how do we make sure that we are scaling our environment and scaling our recruitment tools to match their culture? I think a little internal work to be pushing on the levers and also responses from candidates, make sure we're following up with those people once we hire them. What attracted you? What made you convert to an employee during our process? Really listening to that and leaning into those levers and again, scaling them to the agency or area that you're recruiting for really helps to drive that culture. It's a lot of work, but I think it yields a lot of good things. Yeah, great comments, Reid. Another thing that came to my mind is a lot of times we think about, well, we're the face of the company, we're the face of hiring in HR. It's our job to change the culture. It's our job to set the bar. If we're not doing it, nobody else is going to do it, which there's a component of that that is true. But really, know that we can't do it all as just an HR unit, right? It has to be a collective approach across the organization. And so one of the biggest impacts that you can have across the whole organization in terms of developing a culture that people are excited about and wanna be part of is working with your leaders, your managers, right? Because you think about your employees overall, the most interaction that they're gonna have is gonna be with their direct manager. And if they have a relationship with their manager where there's trust, where they feel like they're looking out for their greater good, they're providing opportunities for them to develop, for them to advance. It doesn't have to be all fun and games all the time, but really making sure that there's communication opportunities with that leader and that they're providing the employee an opportunity to be heard. And if you're looking at helping develop that culture with the younger workforce with those Gen Z and Millennial folks, really they wanna be plugged in. They wanna be heard. They wanna feel like they're part of something. And that really starts with leadership and those direct managers and being able to do a little bit of culture training with them and help with that trickle down effect, can go a really long way. Awesome. We have another question. This one is in regards to job posting. Like what's on trend for job postings? What people are currently looking for? And I actually would love to take a stab at this one being a Gen Z myself. But we did put out a blog last December. You can find it on our website, but it is basically about how to capitalize on tech layoffs, how you can reach those people, how you can attract those types of people to fill your open positions. I encourage you guys to look it up. It's a great resource. But a couple of things that we put in there as far as job postings and what people are looking for, I think one key thing that you can do to improve those is looking at what other maybe even tech companies are using like their vernacular, their duties, the job titles. You can use a lot of those same words that those people are using because there's a lot of crossover with maybe a job that they had in the past with the job posting that you are currently trying to fill. And even using those types of words will attract that top talent. And obviously they're gonna be interested because it is basically providing them with a job description that they are looking for and that they're familiar with. So that is a tip that I have coming from a young twenty something. Erin, do you have anything to add to how you can improve job posting and how you can utilize tips to reach a broader demographic? No, I think that's spot on, Vanessa. Absolutely fantastic. Just to add to that, it's really less is more, right? When you're looking to get in front of somebody, you think about yourself and the amount of time that you have to consume information. There's so much coming at us, right? If we have these really complex, complicated log, job postings that have a lot of detail in them and you really have to dig to find the value and understand what the role is all about. Think about just kind of putting the cliff notes version, bubbling it to the top of what you would be interested in seeing almost like making a movie trailer of your job posting, like just being able to excite them with the parts that are gonna resonate well with them. And then making sure that it's consumable from a mobile device, right? A lot of times working with this younger generation, they're not sitting at a computer, they're not gonna take time to read through a whole job posting. They wanna get to a quick link that can take them to a splash page about your agency, what you're doing, the culture, like why would I wanna work there? And what are some of the benefits? What are they doing in the community? What are they doing with work life balance? And am I calling those things out for them to easily see within that job post in addition to the duties of the job, right? So it's making it a little bit more attractive, a little bit more exciting thinking about that last movie trailer that you saw that made you wanna see that movie. What was it about that? Like let's make the job postings a little bit more like that as we're trying to tailor these jobs to the folks that we wanna bring in. Awesome. Let's go ahead and just do two more questions. We did have this one submitted. They asked, how do you integrate technology into the onboarding process? They said they currently only use paper. Yeah, great question. Great, great, great question and comment. We see that a lot with a lot of our agencies. Being a applicant tracking company first, we were to the market twenty plus years ago with our job board and then the applicant tracking technology to help manage those inquiries and requests from the job board. And we quickly found that we couldn't be that one stop shop, that we just had too much demand and need from our customers to be able to facilitate that process further and being able to have that electronic experience, not just through the recruiting process but through an onboarding process as well. So at NeoGov we do have an onboarding application that syncs up directly with Insight. There's also other digital forms that are out there that basically allow you to have checklists where you can engage with the new candidate or the new hire, take them through some of the things that they're required to do pre hire and then post hire, and then be able to have them plugged in directly with HR as well as their leader, and understanding, you know, what HR needs to do, what the leader needs to do, what the new employee needs to do. And then also taking them through and showcasing, you know, what their experience is gonna be as a new hire, taking them back to culture, being able to provide and link them into, you know, content and information about your agency, where to park, what to expect on day one, everything that's gonna provide them with a good experience virtually and digitally should they not have a physical opportunity to connect with folks and point them in the right way. So definitely would encourage you to check out NeoGov onboard or even just any other digital formats that you might be able to look at that would more cater to the type of crowd or employee grouping that you're gonna see as you're recruiting these days. Awesome, I don't know if Reid's available, but let's go ahead and do this last question. Someone was asking, how can you raise concerns with management and decision makers about things like high turnover or improving technology in their department? Yeah, I mean honestly, I often, and in fact I was wondering if my voice was in this survey because I so recently turned over from the Commonwealth, but I often use other people's information and data, you know, just the statistic about what turnover does and the cost of the company and kind of, you know, taking that statistic and saying, okay, so what this could mean for you is, you know, X amount of money based on your salary. So using this information, using the things that everybody's saying, really can't argue with the data and what everybody's saying about trends. Would lean into that to have those conversations and then relate them to your environment appropriately. I think that's a really good way to approach management. Know, and it's always about support, support, support, right? Like, you know, HR can sometimes be seen as, you know, the compliance, but it's really not. It's about changing that dialogue that we are here to support And, you know, by supporting you, I can tell you, you know, what the unintended consequences are, and the impact that this turnover or lack of good recruitment can have for us, and what it can look like on the flip side. So, definitely leaning into some of these resources that are available to you as HR professionals. Awesome. Aaron, do have anything to add to that? No, I think read nailed that one. That was great. Thank you. Awesome. Awesome. Well, wraps up our Q and A. I know there's some questions that we did not get to, so I apologize for that, but we will have our follow-up emails go out tomorrow morning. Again, that email is gonna include a recording of the presentation, the slide deck, and then all the resources that we mentioned that are linked in the slides will be available to you. You can do to improve those as well. So look for that tomorrow. Again, thank you guys so much for participating, for engaging, for asking us questions. We'd love to keep the conversation going. So again, look for that follow-up email and you'll also have the opportunity to schedule a consultation call with our team if you have further questions about our products or any topics that we brought up in our presentation today. So thank you guys so much. Have a great day and we'll see you guys next time. Bye.