Recommendation to receive and file a report back from Human Resources, City Auditor, and Health and Human Services Department on the Human Resource Audit and Trauma-Informed City that was originally approved by City Council on September 18, 2018.
And move on to the next item. We'll go back to the regular agenda on this. It's the programs. Item 15. Yes. We're going to go back to the regular agenda now. Okay. We'll go back to identity. Item 15 is communication from Councilmember Pierce, Councilwoman Price Recommendation to receive and File Report on the Human Resources Audit and Trauma Informed City. It's just pies. Spears. Yes. Thank you. About a year ago, we put together an item with Councilmember Price and Councilmember Austin on our H.R. practices, requesting an audit and also a conversation around trauma informed practices for the city. So I'm happy today that we've got some staff reports and then I'll have a couple of questions afterwards. But I really want to applaud our city auditor and our team for a thorough dove into this. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. Members of the council councilmember peers. We have three short staff reports, oral reports that we'd like to give as this item asked for kind of three separate things. One is the trauma informed should be led by Theresa Chandler, our interim deputy city manager. One is kind of a brief overview of the hiring efforts and, you know, that's an ongoing effort. But you have a large two from four in front of you that details the status report as of March. And then our city auditor would like to say a few words as well. So we will start with Theresa. Gentlemen, please. Good evening, Honorable Vice Mayor and Council Members. Thank you for the opportunity to present on our trauma informed systems efforts. In 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services began working with community partners to explore the possibility of becoming a trauma informed city. In 2016, the group launched Trauma and Resiliency in Forum Long Beach, also known as Tree Shelby, a citywide initiative focused on reducing the impacts of persistent trauma in organizations and across systems. This network is a group of Long Beach professionals who are committed to holding the vision, setting priorities, developing and tracking data measurements and championing a trauma informed Long Beach. I would like to share some information with you on what a trauma and resiliency informed system actually is. But I must start with defining trauma. The continuous exposure to violence, poverty and other forms of disparity can have significant impacts on communities. Trauma can be defined as a psychological, emotional response to an event or an experience that is deeply distressing or disturbing. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions can include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships, and even physical symptoms like headaches and nausea. When trauma happens, it has short term and long term effects on the individual, on families and on the overall community. For many people in Long Beach, the continuous exposure to unsafe environments has resulted in higher rates of heart disease, respiratory illness and other health related outcomes. Persistent trauma not only impacts our community members and clients, it impacts our service providers, systems and the physical environment. Places and spaces where people live, work and play. Like schools, health care facilities, faith based organizations, social services and businesses play a key role in addressing the impacts of trauma within communities. How services are offered in these spaces actually play a key role in either reducing or enhancing the effects of being exposed to this trauma for their employees and service providers. The way in which services service providers hold, process and manage trauma will in turn have an impact on the experiences of community members who are seeking services. Many of these folks are trying to navigate complex systems while caring their own traumatic load. The Health Department and others recognize that a crucial point to interrupt the cycle of retraumatize is the retraumatizing of clients. Is supporting staff in addressing the vicarious trauma they might experience regularly in the workplace? In simpler terms, when a person walks in the door who is carrying a load of trauma and the staff person providing the service doesn't understand the effects of this person may be carrying. This can sometimes cause a domino effect of unsuccessful interactions between the two that may lead to more trauma for both the client and the staff person. Vicarious trauma is the emotional and psychological impact of connecting with the traumatic life events of other people. It often occurs without awareness. It accumulates over time and can change a worker's overall view of the world and people around them. This as this often affects a person's overall health and wellbeing as well. Resiliency, on the other hand, refers to the ability to cope with hardships and adapt to challenges or change. Resiliency develops over time and gives the capacity not only to manage with life's challenges, but also to be better prepared for the next stressful situation. The ability to remain hopeful is essential to resiliency and the process of healing. A trauma informed system is one in which all people within the organization recognize and respond to the impact of trauma. Traumatic stress on those who have contact with the system, including those seeking services, and us as service providers. This initiative is designed specifically to move Long Beach to become a trauma and resiliency informed city. The goal is that over time, collectively, we will embrace a comprehensive understanding of trauma and resiliency and incorporate this into our policy and practice. The implementation of the Tri Tre Alb initiative includes three core components training and education, policy and practice, change and evaluation. The goals of the pilot are to one begin with two identified systems the Health Department and the Long Beach Public Libraries, to adopt policies and procedures that enhance the delivery of services through trauma and resiliency. Informed approaches to convene a task force to advise the development of strategies to support staff in how to deliver trauma and resiliency. Informed Care and three Document Organizational Culture shift in the processes demonstrating how services are delivered and communities engaged for future replication. The Health Department and Library staff, as well as the City of Long Beach, Human Resources Department and the City Council offices, will receive training on these practices, the impact of trauma on ourselves and our clients, and tools for building resiliency in order to mean healthy, healthy responses in our work place. Relationships, training for h.R. And City Council will be prioritized and conducted in January 2020. Training will begin for health and library staff shortly thereafter. Additionally, the Health Department and library policies and procedures will be assessed for alignment with trauma and resiliency. Informed approaches and recommendations will be made for policy change. The evaluation component is designed to help us assess how well the training promotes learning and implementation of trauma and resiliency, informed approaches and the degree to which the policy changes are effective. This concludes my presentation. I'm available for any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. One of the experiences. So we'd like to have now, Alex Vasquez, give a short overview of some of the hiring improvements that we've been working on, along with our partners in the Civil Service Department. Uh. Good evening, council members. Um. What was submitted was a copy of a two from four memo outlining the city's review of our hiring process back in September of 2018. The Council City Council asks, requested the city manager to provide a review of its hiring process and the turnaround time for hiring new employees. Yeah. The improving the hiring process has been a top priority for the city manager, human resources department and civil service department, as well as all city departments. Over the last year, the city has also engaged, utilizing resources from a few fellow to help us perform an in-depth analysis and mapping process of our selection processes. Attached to the two from four Memo is a PowerPoint presentation that we provided our managers, and it outlines our approach to this review and provides some data that we collected. And it also provides a listing of some of our findings and some of our changes that have already been implemented and basically our approach on a go forward basis. What we did was we took a basically a biomass approach and we brought all stakeholders together to evaluate our hiring process. It was a collaborative effort and it was fully embraced by both civil service and human resources, along with all other city departments and stakeholders. We did a basically a a review of the selection process and mapped it out and outlined each of the steps and attempted to quantify the amount of time it takes to hire an individual. One of the things I just wanted to point out in the PowerPoint, we also provided some statistics about our hiring process. And on on page nine, I wanted to point out that we also took a look at what types of employment do we have in the city and where are we experiencing significant issues with hiring employees? Approximately 59% of our workforce work in classified service. 35% are unclassified, and approximately 6% are in management positions. As I indicated in in this PowerPoint on slides ten and 11, there's a step by step. Depiction of the hiring process. We also took a look at our vacancy rate by department. On Slide 12, our vacancy rates were ranging between 3% to 26%, depending on the department. And there were various factors that. Were attributed to the vacancy rates. Some of them were based on some departments receiving additional positions at the time. We did this analysis and some of them were positions that were kept vacant or were hard to fill. Some of the key findings were that there were some challenges with filling vacancies and the amount of time it was taking to fill those vacancies. The amount of time it took to fill vacancies depended upon whether or not there was a civil service list available for hiring departments to utilize or whether or not the position was unclassified or classified. But in general, I think we all recognize that we could do better. And we have taken some steps to look at ways that we can basically eliminate unnecessary processes or expedite certain processes so that we can assist our departments in filling their positions. I can go into more detail about some of these efforts that we implemented to streamline the hiring process. But we're not done. We are still working together with civil service and we are also will be engaging the AI team this year to assist us in continuing the effort of streamlining the hiring process and basically quantifying those efforts. And I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you. And thank you, Vice Mayor, for our last presentation. We'd like to call up our city auditor, Laura Dowd, who will talk about the recent onboarding audit that she completed in partnership with H.R. in the city manager's office. Great. Thank you very much. Vice Mayor and City Council Members. Our office was requested to perform an audit in this critical area of human resources. And given my own staff's workload, we did contract out with a audit firm to conduct this performance on it. And the findings really boil down to three areas that generally the city's onboarding policies and policies and programs are and are adequate at this time. And we'd like to say that the city has also implemented some very positive aspects in their onboarding program and some best practices that the team found as they did benchmarks with other cities . And so we want to give them a lot of credit for having a very good, especially pre-employment onboarding process. And we're also very pleased that the city manager and human resources department have been very collaborative in this process and in agreement with the recommendations and have already taken significant steps to implement the recommendations that the audit has recommended. I would just like to briefly give an overview of a couple of those recommendations that the audit made and one in regarding the pre-employment. There were two recommendations made, and one was the additional transparency to be provided by the Human Resources Department in their hiring regarding background checks. And this could reduce the uncertainty and frustration experienced by departments when one of their potential employees was denied and human resources has already trained personnel from the city regarding the background process and that what they do in making their decisions. The other was to perform a cost benefit analysis be performed regarding the value and relevancy of medical screenings for all employees. The City of Long Beach was only one of the six benchmark cities that did medical screenings for every employee for the post-employment on board onboarding. The city's post-employment approach is very is less formalized than the city's pre-employment onboarding steps, and the recommendations include for the city to develop a written onboarding policy. Or guide where in onboarding roles and responsibilities and expectations are defined and communicated to department managers, administrative officers and key personnel, and also to provide the city wide new employee orientation on a monthly basis. This has been a very successful program that the city has established, and so we recommend them to do it on a monthly basis, and they are doing that on a on a monthly basis. And it's been a very successful program. The other is to to have a little better tracking of the attendance at these new employee orientations so we know who's there and who's not attending and why, and to develop a policy that would standardize informal performance check ins of employment to ensure new employees are provided with sufficient feedback. And lastly, to develop an exit interview policy that would include a standard employee exit survey. Exit surveys and interviews can provide a valuable information to improve onboarding and employee retention. And then there's also a section on the elected officials onboarding. And we all know that onboarding is not only important to city staff and city management, but also for elected officials, as we are, and also for our staff's work. We're not subject to the city manager's onboarding policies. So the recommendations that the audit recommends is that with the mayor's lead, city council should adopt a policy establishing an official city council onboarding process and develop a comprehensive onboarding or orientation program and materials for council members. The second was the mayor's office should develop a separate onboarding document guide that is more tailored to Legislative Department at will employees providing pertinent information and guidance on various topics, including both requirements and voluntary steps. Essentially better guidance on what out will employees should know about city policies and requirements. All elected officials should encourage their new employees to participate in the relevant citywide onboarding activities, such as the new employee orientation. And that concludes my presentation. I do want to thank the city departments and the council members and the mayor and the departments and especially the city employees that participated in this audit. There were a lot of interviews that were conducted and surveys that were conducted. We received good feedback from the employees who participated, and we appreciate the agreement to all of the recommendations that this audit made. And I hope to assist in the collaboration of developing policies and procedures so that we can all fulfill the important duties and responsibilities that we have to public service. Thank you. Mrs. Dao, thank you very much. Thank you. Are you through? And that concludes our staff report. Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. Councilmember. Do you want to speak first? Okay, thanks. Again, I want to thank all the departments that worked on this. I know I'd kind of expected to see the recommendations and timelines in a PowerPoint, but that's okay. I think the information that was provided is really fantastic. I want to thank the work around trauma informed and really being able to explain that to the entire council and to our community that when we get those trainings and that information, we're better able to assist not only our community members that we get a lot of calls , particularly in the second with members of our community that might need a little extra handholding. And so I'm sure that this trainings will help us in addition to our staff. And so we'll really connect the trauma informed with our practices. What I read in the consultant's report, you know, I think highlighted exactly what we kind of knew, which was that we, you know, doing medical evaluations for every single employee, being one of only six cities that does that. I can tell you as someone that's hired a lot of employees here and it's someone that talks to a lot of workers when they go through that process, if somebody tries to get hired and they take anxiety medicine or they have something on that, they don't use that often, but they feel that they have to disclose that . Then they have to talk to H.R. about it. Then they have to go to their doctor and get it, get a letter stating what it's for. And often whenever we're dealing with whether it's our mental health, which all of us, you know, have mental health challenges at different times, it really has been triggering for a lot of our employees. So I really am happy to see that they recommend removing that if it's not needed in that department. And I'm assuming that some of the departments might be Fire and PD that really need to go through the medical. I'm sure there are other departments, but I did want to ask one question because it was brought up through our health department. It was brought up through several other community members. And I'm not doing this to be to trigger a whole debate, but it's really just a question. Cannabis is legal now. Alcohol's legal. We don't test for alcohol. Is the city going to look at a cannabis policy or are they going to continue that for the entire city? Are they exploring it only for certain members of our employees? So we were also excited to see the editors recommendations about the medical. That's something in management that we've had questions about for a while. And it was part of the review that we were undertaking. And so this put a finer point on it and provided some data and some benchmarks. So we agree. One of the things that medical has done was reduce worker's comp costs that we do as a city, have one of the lower workers comp costs. But it also, you know, is an impediment to hiring because we're doing it for everybody and not as selective. So we are interested in some positions have to go through a medical and then others you can be more of in is a judgment call of which ones do we really want for workers comp purposes to go through a medical or not? To your question of of medical marijuana, that is something we're going to be looking at as we go through this. So it is illegal substance. And for some workers, it will absolutely be for forbidden because it's under DOJ guidelines and that type of thing. But we don't know the answer to that yet. But if we're not doing medical testing of every employee, we wouldn't necessarily need to do it through the background check. That said, you're not allowed to be intoxicated at work, whether it's illegal drug or an illegal drug. So we would still have the ability to do reasonable suspicion testing and those types of things to make sure if you're at work, you are not you are not inebriated. Just like with any substance, alcohol, pain pills, anything else. So I just want to hope that we as a city are looking through that lens of trying to make it aligned with with policies as much as possible. Other things that I just want to highlight because they weren't talked about, other onboarding processes that they've done is around your driver's history. And so if you're not required to drive for your job or you do, you have to have that background check. And I know with one of our employees, that was something that was ten years ago that came up and it stalled her onboarding for four weeks. And so I really am happy to see, you know, this third party do this audit and give us some of those recommendations. Other points that I'd like to highlight in the report about some of the vacancies. I know that we had someone in public comment speak about our animal shelter. And I just want to highlight, I think we have eight vacancies or eight positions slotted for our animal shelter, but only two of them are filled right now. Is that correct? I'm sorry to spring that question on you, but. I don't know if we have that today. Vacancies really are a snapshot in time. There are times when we're fully staffed. There's times when we have vacancies. We don't purposely hold vacancies, you know, under normal circumstances. But we also have things called vacancy targets that the council puts in the budget. So we may have eight vacancies, but it depends on the list and where we are in the hiring process. Our goal is to be fully staffed whenever possible. Of course. And I guess when when staff comes back with a report later in the year on what they've accepted, is some of the recommendations really looking at are there opportunities like if we have a veterinary school nearby, is our Parks and Rec team able to work with that school to try to fill vacancies in that department working with our workforce development? Those are some of the topics that I wanted to to talk about on that. And then I am going to ask on some of the vacancies. Also, we know that sometimes we have attrition. Obviously, I know in the past we've had a tuition fund and I just wanted to get clarity and history on that very quickly. There's something to kind of retain some employees or upward mobility. So tuition fund is one of the items that is in in the MCU. It's currently under a grievance procedure right now from IBM. So there is an active grievance that is going through the process on that. In terms of funding, it has not been funded since, I believe, 2005. So it was one of those things that went away could be 26, but it went away during the three year budget process as we did a three year plan. So we have not had active for for most departments, you know, funded program. I know that I'm over my time, I will say that I want to make sure that the H.R. practices that the mayor's office has talked about for legislative are things that we also have for our city attorney, city prosecutor and our city auditor as well. Thank you guys very much for a great work. Thank you, Mrs. Price. Thank you. And I want to thank my colleague, Councilmember Pearce, for bringing this item, this the series of items forward. I think it's evaluating, allowing us and actually forcing us to evaluate some of our practices and make them better and adjust to adjust them to modern times and modern realities in the workforce. And I think it was very educational. I think staff for the reports tonight, I thought it was really great, especially all the work around trauma informed practices. I think I think felt the older some of us get, the more we realize childhood trauma impacts the lens with which you view the whole world and your reaction to things and your sensitivities and your triggers and the like. So the more we can create a supportive work environment where we're working at understanding the core of the person rather than the exterior the person, I think the better will be as a as a workforce. So thank you. Thank you. Councilman Austin. Thank you so much. I want to thank also Councilmember Peers. For bringing this forward. You know, this could have been. Literally three separate items all in once and but but very substantive. I want to thank staff. For their very. Very detailed report. I know a lot of work went into researching and and especially the city auditor the audit team for their work here. I'm looking at and I think we all learn something here, particularly about being trauma informed or being a trauma informed city. But from from. An employee standpoint, I'm concerned about the vicarious trauma, particularly on many of our our employees who who are dealing with very, very tough situations on a daily basis, not just our public safety, but parks and recreation, our health department employees. And I think this is something that we need to continue to watch and keep in mind. And yeah, overall. Thank you. Great report. Excellent item. Looking forward, I think we're going to be a better city administration as a result. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Nelson. And in public comment on this item. I have. I only have one, Mr. Cantrell. Very good. You. It's good you. Okay. And a question. No. Okay. The only one. Devon. Devon, you. Good evening, Honorable Vice. Mayor and City Council. Thank you for taking the time to hear this item. My name is Devin Ambler and I'm a representative of the IAM. So this report is through and the recommendations we think will move Long Beach forward so that we can continue providing world class services which our members provide on the daily. This is going to give. The employees the support they need to better do their jobs, and it's going to help management because we know that filling vacancies is very difficult. And to get your job done, you need those vacancies filled and that's really important. So we want to make sure that you're taking all of the recommendations very seriously. But we did have a couple of notes here. Firstly, we actually haven't. Seen any part timers at the new employee orientations monthly. We would love to have them there. So, you know, I know that we'd heard that they weren't coming to it, but we haven't seen them. So if we can work that out, they'd be fantastic. Make sure they're really part of the loop and are informed in everything. But also when it comes to when we're talking about judgment calls with medical testing and everything like that before onboarding, I don't like the term judgment call. I think we need sound metrics to make sure that people are being treated fairly. When you do judgment calls, that leads to disparate treatment, and we already know that certain communities are impacted by that more than other communities. But other than that, we're really thankful that this is happening. We think it's going to be fantastic for everybody, for the Council, for management, for the staff, and most importantly, for the communities we service. So thank you. Thank you very much, Kevin. See, there's no more speakers now. Excuse me. Yes. Smile when you look at me. I have two other comments. One that I was supposed to comment on earlier on the original recommendation. The second item on their request of the city auditor to conduct an audit of the process for employees, interns, volunteers, commissioners, elected officials to be informed of their rights as it related to discrimination, harassment and retaliation. I believe at that meeting, Councilmember Gonzales also talked about an online website similar to L.A. and I don't expect to report on that today, but I did want to flag it publicly and just say that we'll be following up with the H.R. department and how that's going. I know that there's an ethics audit coming, is that correct? What's the timeline on that ethics audit? You can just, like, yell at and I'll repeat it for you. Next month or two. It will be. Wonderful. Thank you. And again, with this item, we really just trying to make Long Beach, you know, the best city to work for, which I think is is a great goal for us to have. So thank you for your patience. Councilmember We have an answer. Alex Bass was on the how many harassment trainings you've been doing recently. And thank you, Tom. Well, I want to just share some information at the new employee orientation. When we onboard employees, they are provided with copies of policies and directed to where they can find the policies related to harassment, discrimination in the workplace, workplace violence and so on. And I also just wanted to share that so far where we're undergoing our campaign to train all managers and supervisors as required by state law. And to date, we've already trained 1198 supervisors and managers. And this year we were also mandated by the state to train all city employees. And today we've held 28 sessions and train 2548 city employees on prevention of workplace harassment. So in total, we've trained 3746 employees, and we're going to continue our efforts to ensure that all city employees are trained in this area. Over halfway there. Thank you so much. Great work, guys. Thank you very much. Let's see if there's more to speak as you please cast your vote.