Staff attrition rates for full-time jobs at the City of St. Albert are a bit higher than the acting director of human resources would like to see.
Mayor Nolan Crouse recently provided a chart looking at the overall attrition rate for the equivalent of full-time city staff for the last 10 years. His numbers show the lowest attrition rate was in 2014, with 7.2 per cent, or 42 employees, departing the city.
The highest was 2008 with 13.2 per cent, according to his numbers. This year, as of about mid-March, his chart shows six people have left in 2016.
However, Karen Sillito, acting director of human resources, said the mayor’s numbers and the city’s numbers differ due to a difference in calculation.
The mayor, she thinks, has been doing it on an annual basis, whereas the city’s calculations use a rolling 12 month period to do the calculation.
Her numbers for the past 12 months show a rate of 8.8 per cent. The number for 2015 is also different, at 9.3 per cent.
‘It’s going to look slightly different,” she said.
Either way, the numbers are still up over 2014.
“They are slightly higher than we would like to see them,” Sillito said. She said the numbers aren’t anything alarming, though.
“Traditionally when the economy is strong, we tend to see more job movement, and when the economy is weaker we tend to see people stay in our job,” Sillito said. “Right now we’re still seeing an increase in people movement even though the economy’s not strong … so you throw that in with a slight increase, it means we should be paying attention.”
Paying attention can mean engaging employees to understand what’s causing a slight increase in departures. Reasons for departure can vary, and include retirements.
The city does conduct exit interviews but they are voluntary.
“You want some turnover, that’s healthy,” Sillito said.
Crouse said he sees in the numbers a trend of stability for city staff.
The lower numbers in early 2016 could be indicators of a couple of different situations.
“It’s either an indication of where people are happy,” he said, or it can be an indication of a tough economy.
St. Albert’s never been able to benchmark its attrition numbers in an apples to apples comparison against other communities, he said. It would be tough to get to zero departures when there are hundreds of employees.
“I’m not concerned with the six per cent,” he said.
But he does see public sector numbers as being higher than he’s used to from his career before politics.
“I would have to say over the long haul I always felt the 10 per cent is high, it always seemed higher than what I experienced in the private sector,” Crouse said.
That’s in part because in the private sector there are often less choices within a region, he said. In this region, there are more than 20 municipalities to choose from within commuting distance so people looking for municipal careers have lots of choices.
