Village begins employee compensation study
By Tracy Ouellette
Editor
The Village of East Troy is looking at what village employees make and how to structure a new pay schedule to stay competitive in the job market.
Katie McCloskey, from Carlson Dettmann Consulting, briefed the Village Board July 20 on the compensation study process the company was hired to do.
She told the board she met with the village employees and department heads that day to discuss the first step in the process – the job requirements questionnaire to be completed by all village employees.
McCloskey emphasized that the questionnaires were to determine the specifics of what the employees’ jobs entailed and they were not about how well the employees did their job.
She told the board employee evaluations could be used at a later point in a merit pay plan, but this first stage was about determining what each employee was doing on the job and where their responsibilities were.
The village hasn’t done a job study since 2008 and McCloskey said a great deal has changed since then because of Act 10. She asked the board to give her some direction on where in the market they want to be in regard to wages and said it would be her recommendation that the village be competitive with the private sector in its pay scale unless there was a compelling financial reason not to.
The board decided it wanted a pay schedule that was in line with the private sector with options to go over that baseline to attract quality employees. Part of the work McCloskey will do for the pay schedule revamp is to gather as much information as possible on comparable jobs in both the private and public sector for the board after the job questionnaires have been completed. She asked the board to give some thought as to what area communities they would like to compare East Troy to as well to help her with that part of the research.
McCloskey also asked the board what type of pay schedule it was interested in having. She gave them three options – a step schedule which has employees moving up the pay scale in fixed steps where everyone is treated equally; a merit based plan, where raises are given based on job performance; or combination plan that mixed the step format and merit based format.
She also said Carlson Dettmann does not recommend any employee’s pay be cut when the new schedule is put in place. She said there were ways to even out anyone who might be over or underpaid according to the schedule.
Village Board President Randy Timms said the village was looking to get away from the traditional step compensation plan and was more interested in either the merit pay or the combination plan for their new pay scale.
There was some concern from the board members that the study wouldn’t be completed in time for the setting of the budget, but McCloskey said she would be able to give them an general idea of what it’s going to cost to change the pay scale by the beginning of October, so the board could budget what it needed to implement it next year.
