09-02-25 City Council Meeting Packet

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38 CITY OF LAKE ELMO, MN  Efficient Work Execution – Training Lead Operators and others on best practices and efficiency standards for the use of equipment, coordination of resources, and assignment of the number of workers who should respond to different types of jobs.  Focus on Safety – Setting clear expectations regarding a culture of safety and performance of work according to established and required safety practices.  Performance Expectations – Communicate how to consistently apply performance appraisal metrics tied to expectations for specific job categories. SAFETY Recommendation 12: Work to instill and sustain a culture of safety During the interview process, there were consistent concerns raised regarding safety issues, in a manner indicating a culture that prioritizes efficiency and productivity over safety. In part, Operators are concerned that job tasks are assigned with fewer staff than recommended by knowledgeable third parties. Furthermore, if staff are routinely placed in unsafe situations due to low staffing, it becomes difficult to hold them accountable for their unsafe actions, which can place the organization at unacceptable exposure to risks that could impact it in a number of ways, up to and including significant financial risk. This is why organizations speak of cultivating a “culture” of safety. It is a recognition that if one aspect of safety is ignored, other aspects of safety are more difficult to maintain. The Department should work to develop a culture of safety and instill that culture into all elements of its work. This requires several steps based around communication, collaboration, and coordination of safety activities. Currently, the Department provides safety training courses from external providers to its staff, and this should continue. Safety training courses are a necessary component of a culture of safety, but they alone are not sufficient. Another component of a safety culture involves an ongoing discussion regarding the tasks and work environments that Operators experience. Given that a primary concern regards staffing levels, representatives of the Operators and management should work together to agree to staffing guidelines for common tasks. For instance, if a crew is performing tree trimming and operating a woodchipper, safe operating guidelines would direct that one Operator should always be located near the emergency shut-off switch, and the task should be staffed accordingly. Other activities that should have staffing guidelines agreed to include any work that occurs in the street, such as tree trimming, and confined space entries. These standards should be agreed to, codified, and monitored and tracked as part of compliance with SOPs. The final element to building a culture of safety is to ensure that a safe harbor that employees can turn to outside of the Department exists. In the City, this resource would most naturally reside with Human Resources, though in larger organizations it might be the Safety Officer. The intent of the notion of a safe harbor is to have an independent resource that employees can turn to for questions of unsafe behavior outside of their line of supervision. Each of these steps should help address the perception that minimal staffing levels on job tasks are a product of the strain produced by the need to meet service level targets with the available staffing. Implementing our staffing recommendations, as well as implementing the work order system in Beehive, flips the staffing formulation. The question among leadership should no longer be, “How can we meet our service level targets with our total number of Operators?” Now, the question becomes, “Given the safe staffing requirements and the work orders that we must complete to meet our service level targets, how many total Operators does the Department need?”