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Jill Madajczyk - CHRO, City of Birmingham, Alabama

In this episode of The 3rd Question we talk with Jill Madajczyk - CHRO for the City of Birmingham, Alabama as she discusses strategic ways to tackle this changing workforce and attract the next generation to public service.  

 

Video Transcript 

 

 

Ryan James:

Hello and welcome to The 3rd Question, a video interview series with public sector thought leaders from around the country. Today I am joined by Jill Madajczyk. She is the CHRO for the city of Birmingham in Alabama. So Jill, thank you so much for joining me today.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

My pleasure, Ryan.

 

Ryan James:

Well, before we get into our three questions, why don't you give the audience a little bit of an introduction of you, your history in the public sector and a little bit about the city itself.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

Okay, great. Like you said, I'm Jill Madajczyk. I'm originally from the north. I'm a transplant down in the south. I originally started my career in HR from the legal field. I did a lot of employment law. My first public sector employment was with the city of Memphis and I was there as a senior assistant city attorney. Again was heavily involved in HR, moved to a deputy director position and then transitioned here into the Chief HR Officer role in the city of Birmingham.

 

Ryan James:

Very cool. What about the city itself? What's the size of the city? Type of complexity?

 

Jill Madajczyk:

The city is about 250,000 slightly more, slightly less. We have 3,500 full-time employees. We currently don't have many part-time employees. That was one area that suffered during the pandemic. We have about $413 million budget for this current fiscal year.

 

Ryan James:

Okay. Well, you've led me into my first question beautifully there, because I'm going to talk a little bit about last year. 2020 was a tough year for local governments for a lot of reasons, right? They made the transition to remote workforce. They had to continue to kind of ebb and flow with safety measures as that continued to change. And obviously deal with some of that budget fallout from COVID-19 or the challenges around budget, maybe I should say a little more accurately. So how did your city deal with those challenges from an HR perspective and how did you manage them? I guess also, I like to think in a more optimistic way, it's the part B of the question. What are you excited about for your city and your department as how you can evolve coming out of COVID in 2020?

 

Jill Madajczyk:

So I think for me, I'll start at the end what I'm very optimistic about is the pandemic forced city government into the 21st century. Telework was not heard of.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

It was not something that was generally allowed. We did not have effective use of technology as far as certain things like WebEx, Zoom, et cetera, Teams. So it forced us to bring those processes up to date. The city of Birmingham, I am very proud to say, our mayor was one of the first leaders to adapt a local ordinance requiring masks. We also sent home all of our workers that we could. Now you have to understand for a local governmental entity, that's only about a third of our employees.

 

Ryan James:

Right.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

We have a large fire department, a large police department, other essential workers, our Department of Public Works. The other thing is, is that although we're not recognized that way, all of the individuals that were home are essential to those critical operations. I think that, and I tell my team all the time, HR and finance tend to be the unsung heroes because we're the ones that make sure people keep getting paychecks.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

We dealt with it in a variety of different ways. In March. We basically sent everybody home that we could. We even cut back some on our city services. But then in May we realized that that was not going to be able to last long-term. And so we started bringing people back. We started bringing people back with staggered schedules, where we would have people spend about 50% of the time in the office and 50% of the time at home. Then when we had the numbers ramp up again, at the end of the year during the holidays, we went to our stage three staffing, which was where we only had individuals who had to be in the office for appellations in the office, otherwise, you teleworked. It brought challenges because we don't, and didn't, have a lot of the technology that we needed. A lot of our employees had to use their own equipment to be able to participate. We had some employees that were not very happy about doing that.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

We also struggled because we do provide essential services in areas such as community services through our parks and libraries. We assisted them in figuring out ways that they could continue to provide services while still maintaining social distance. We required all of our decisions to be driven by the public health officials and HR was part of the critical or core team relating to our COVID controls along with our fire chief, as well as our chief of operations and chief of staff. Then we had a larger pool of employees that helped us come to some decisions.

 

Ryan James:

Got it. Yeah. I imagine that you were a hub for communication for all these employees, whether they were home shored, the hybrid, or they were there on site for their jobs, you were the one that were driving that communication strategy.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

We were, and we also had to provide other resources. We saw a great uptick in our employee assistance program. We went to TeleMed on that, which not a lot of EAP providers were doing. We had a lot of group sessions. And then for Birmingham, the other thing that really affected us was the social issues that arose. I mean, the city of Birmingham is basically the birthplace of the civil rights movement. And while we didn't have any of the significant incidents that some other large metropolitan areas did, it did affect us and it did affect how we operated. And so that complicated things, I think a lot for operating on a local level, because you had issues relating to defunding the police, along with COVID, along with a lot of the events that went along with when the pandemic hit, where people being at home caused more issues.

 

Ryan James:

Right. Right. Well, we're going to talk kind of future a little bit on the second question. So, from the conversations that I've had and from what we see the statistics show us, the workforce in the public sector, it's changing rapidly. I think the statistic it's the silver tsunami. There's 50% of the workforce eligible to retire in the public sector in the next five to seven years. And that varies from organization to organization, but holistically, that's kind of what we see.

 

Ryan James:

So what that's going to mean is new generations, new expectations, new challenges, good or bad for HR departments that they have to adapt to. So from your role as the head of HR, what do you see as some of the strategic ways that you can tackle this changing workforce that's happening in your space? Not just from an attracting the next generation, but just, I guess purely through a communication aspect as well, because every generation wants to be communicated to a little bit differently. Some want it on paper, some want it on their mobile, some want it on social media these days. So what have you been thinking of from a strategic perspective around those things?

 

Jill Madajczyk:

So the one thing we all have to recognize in city government is that people don't come to work for local municipalities to stay. Younger generations move from job to job, to job. I think there are still a few areas that there are exceptions. And I think we're always going to have legacy police officers and legacy firefighter and families that continue that existence. So not only do we have to look at how we attract those individuals, but we have to look at how we provide benefits. A significant amount city resources goes to personnel costs. We have to look at how we can reallocate those dollars so that we can bring in the individuals, recognizing they're going to leave. The communication part is always an issue for a municipality because right now we have employees that range in age from 18 to in their late seventies, we have employees that don't have email addresses from the city.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

We have employees who have limited telephone plans, so even texting them could be an issue. And so we have to learn to communicate to individuals in the space that they want to be communicated in, and in a language that they can understand. Our fiscal year starts on July 1st. And one of the things that we talk about is we have to make sure our message is used in terms and understanding that our audience understands and not just our finance director.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

I think the other thing is, is that we have to look at new benefits. We have to see what people want. City government, a lot of the attraction is based on the defined benefit pension plan. Well, individuals don't really want that anymore. If they know they're only going to stay with an employer for three or four years. I think really what we have to focus on is collecting and making sure we document knowledge. In local government, at least here and in the other places I've worked, you hear a lot that people don't want to share their knowledge because they're afraid they're going to lose their job. Or they don't want to look at new processes because that's not the way it's been done before. And we have to make sure that we're sharing knowledge and we're documenting our processes because there are so many things that just are being done because that's the way it was always done.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

And I think during the pandemic, it showed us that we have to have those in writing so that if we have individuals who are gone, somebody can step in and know how to get the job done. And I think that's the benefit of having the younger generations come through because they don't have an issue in documenting what they have doing and looking at the processes because they don't plan on staying here. And so they want to be able to have somebody to step in for them and to move on to their next opportunity.

 

Ryan James:

Do you think that the not wanting to stay here idea, do you think that's just purely like a umbrella under the municipal, under the city? Or is it, "I don't want to stay in this role in the city, I'd prefer to continue my career as a city worker, but maybe..." You're a great example, you went from the legal side to the HR side. Are any of these younger generations... I love the documenting and keeping the knowledge, expanding your knowledge, because I've heard that so often where we've always done it this way, so we're going to keep doing it this way. When this way might be a little archaic or not as efficient or not as cost-effective as it could be. I guess I've asked two questions there. One is, do people want to change jobs maybe internally or have that opportunity, whether it's cross training, et cetera, which is an HR thing. And then also, how do you make people look at changing how they do things?

 

Jill Madajczyk:

People are interested in moving internally as long as they can move up. The problem sometimes in the government is because of the vesting period relating to pensions, you can't get incumbents who want to move out of their position that they're in. And as the younger generation comes in, while we still have baby boomers and generation X, they still are in these positions and they're not ready to leave yet. And if there is no upward mobility for them, then that causes a stagnation as the chain moves on.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

So you have to look at developing that talent for use in another area. And that's really important, is that every opportunity our employees take to look at a internal promotion, we always from HR reach out to them and their department leader or the department that was interviewing them and ask them, "What do they need to do next?" So when this opportunity arises again, they're ready to move into that world. And so training and development is important and working for the city. I'm proud to say that this is a city that we're happy to train people to move out into the community because they still bring benefit to our city. We create good leaders here and send those good leaders out into our businesses. Then that's only going to benefit the city.

 

Ryan James:

That's a great point. Well, we're already at the third question, short and sweet, but we're there and everyone who watches this series knows I'm a props guy for my third question. So I'm giving you Jill a huge blank check. Well, it's an infinity check written out to the City of Birmingham. Won't go very far, but it's an idea. So if I was able to give you that, that blank check that you could use to... I'm going to make it a little more specific for you in HR. So if you could use it to better help with employee education, communication training, or maybe even investing in technology itself, what would you use it for and why?

 

Jill Madajczyk:

So I would use it for technology. I think that technology is behind in a lot of municipalities. I think, especially when you get to midsize municipalities like this city. Taxpayers want to see where their money is going. They want to have nice streets. They want to have parks. They want to have libraries, community centers, but doing those million dollars of investment in technology is not something they can see. So that's not usually a top priority. But what happens is the revenue base for the city really never changes. But the cost of providing services continues to go up and with technology, we can learn how to make government operate more efficiently, which is going to free up additional dollars to put back into the community, to the things that they can see. And along with that comes, the training and development that's needed by employees.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

We have employees who have not kept up with technology, just like the city hasn't kept up with technology. We have individuals working in administrative clerk roles who do not know how to use the basic tasks of Microsoft. And it's like, how have they stayed here for 25 years and not learn this? And they just haven't and they haven't ever really been given the opportunity. So even during the pandemic, we found some ways to spend money, to be able to look more into training, especially online training, which I think more people are now comfortable with because we were forced to do that over the last. Guess it's 18 months now. I'm not sure how long it's been, I can't keep up.

 

Ryan James:

No longer do we deal in dog years, we deal in COVID years anymore, it feels that way. Well, no, I've heard that. And I would agree with you that it seems that municipal governments and I it goes across the board. I wouldn't even say it's mid-size and small and large. There's definitely a laggardness, if that's a word, in technology adoption, but I've seen a change. I mean, I think COVID forced the hand in some ways, because it was just like, "We have to communicate." But that ongoing lift is just now starting to really happen from the people I talked to. So you're right there with others that I've heard that same sentiment. Well, Jill, listen, our time's up. I really appreciate the few minutes you were able to share with me and the audience today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. I always enjoy meeting new people this way. And so thank you so much for sharing a few thoughts and ideas, and I hopefully get to stay in touch with you in the near future.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

Ryan it's been great. And I look forward to watching the others who participate in this series. I think this is a great opportunity for us to transition knowledge to one another.

 

Ryan James:

We're in season two and this has been a fun, fun thing for me to do. And we've had some great guests with some great thoughts. So thank you for adding your voice.

 

Jill Madajczyk:

Great. Thanks.

 

Ryan James:

Have a great day.