LTD hires former union executive Bill Bradley, hopes to improve retention

Presenter: Lane Transit District creates two new positions after its overhaul of HR, in hopes of improving employee retention. They were losing 24% of their employees. During a board meeting at Valley River Inn Aug. 5, CEO Jameson Auten:

Jameson Auten (LTD, CEO): Over the past 18 months or so, we’ve been really hiring, hiring, hiring. And now we want to keep, keep, keep. And we’ve put some things in place to keep our people.

[00:00:28] One is we look at the engagement surveys. We look at those. You take them with a grain of salt or not. We look at the information in there. And we made some actions based off that feedback.

[00:00:40] We have leadership training throughout our levels of the organization, with the goal of being more empathetic and trying to understand what our frontline employees really need to be successful, what our administrative employees need to be supported.

[00:00:54] We’ve also implemented or installed a labor relations position fairly recently. I’m happy to report that Bill Bradley, who you’ve seen come before you as the union, is in alignment with what we’re trying to accomplish with the organization and he’s in that role.

And the goal for that role is not to, you know, beat ATU (Amalgamated Transit Union) at the bargaining table, you know, we want to be fair. But the goal really is to bring his insights into, you know, how we handle best practices, how we interprete the contract across multiple units.

[00:01:31] You recall IT is now under the bargaining unit. Facilities is under the bargaining unit. We have the operators and we also have the fleet maintenance. We want to make sure that’s being interpreted in a consistent way so our employees are having a good employee experience and we’re in alignment with our contract.

[00:01:49] So we’re happy to report that that’s been received well. It’s been received from well to cautiously optimistic, which I think is fair. Some of the folks covered by the CBA (collective bargaining agreement) have said, ‘You stole our guy,’ but from a good standpoint that they know who he is, they know he’s not going to change, so we’re happy about that.

[00:02:08] The changes that we made to HR fairly recently are going well. We do have a couple speed bumps implementing new things, but the feedback that we’re getting generally is: ‘I’m getting my forms in correctly, I’m getting responsive information and I’m getting, you know, it feels better.’ So we’re starting to see some of that. We’ll report back on specific metrics there.

[00:02:34] Presenter: Jameson said retaining employees helps the district save money.

[00:02:38] Jameson Auten (LTD, CEO): But just some things about retention: Our operations employees, it costs us over $11,000 to recruit. We look at the recruiting costs and the training costs. So each time we are able to reduce our attrition rate, we’re able to save money.

[00:02:54] So we right now, we’re at 24%. If we go down to 14%, it will save us about $360,000 annually. So we’re going to be looking at what the target percent is to make sure that we’re realizing the savings, but also keeping the people that we’ve worked so hard to train.

[00:03:14] The national average on that training is $8,200, so we’re about $3,000 above that. The reason ours is so much more is because of the level of training that we provide. We need nine weeks. We’ll take someone who doesn’t have a CDL, and we need nine weeks training, but we want to make sure that we’re putting safe people out on the road in a safe way.

[00:03:33] However: That also calls into question, you know, is that the most sufficient way to do the training to accomplish the same thing? So we don’t want to sacrifice the level of safety on the street. We want to make sure that we’re doing it in an efficient way. So we’re going to be looking at some strategies there as well.

[00:03:52] Part of the culture shift is driving some of these results. The attrition rate was 24% overall; this year, it’s at 9%. Now, we need to dig in deeper and see what’s really driving that change, which is a good direction to be going into.

[00:04:10] So, I don’t want to speculate, but I think some of the recruiting changes that have happened in some of the training with how we work with our people, particularly our newer people, are starting to pay off.

[00:04:23] We recently implemented a mentorship program, which is pairing new operators with seasoned operators to help them get through that first two years, which is critical. We’ll be measuring that and making sure that that’s working as well before bringing it back to you.

[00:04:37] Long term, we know that the savings compound. So we get better people on the street, we keep those people, then we know that we can focus on: How do we continue to help them to thrive in their position?

[00:04:50] So we’ll keep looking at that, we’ll be coming back to you with where we are with the HR initiatives that we put in place with some numbers on response rate. Of course, that would be reflected in our engagement survey that we’ll put out, the success measures for our mentorship program, and our professional development.

[00:05:10] We’ve invested in professional development at the executive level, but we’ve also invested with our frontline supervisors, which have more of a touch to our frontline employees. So more to come on that, but where we are right now is positive in terms of how we’re filling the organization.

[00:05:27] And we have a ‘chief people officer’ is what we titled it, because, you recall, we eliminated the director position. So we have a chief people officer who has a strong HR background, manages that piece along with Xenium. Xenium right now is working on the foundational pieces, making sure our employee handbook is up to date.

[00:05:50] Presenter: LTD creates a new ‘chief people officer’ and a new labor relations position, and says early results are promising: The attrition rate has dropped from 24 percent to 9 percent.