By Patrick Adrian
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CLAREMONT — Claremont has launched a study to measure its wages and salaries for city employees with those in similar New Hampshire communities in an effort toward citywide pay fairness and long-term retention of staff.
The Claremont City Council held a special meeting Thursday to receive a presentation from Paypoint HR, a Maryland-based consulting firm that conducts analysis for municipalities around the country, including New Hampshire. Over the next few months, Paypoint HR will be meeting with city employees, department heads and neighboring communities to compile data for comparative analysis, which will guide Claremont in making needed adjustments to its citywide compensation system.
Rick Campbell, who co-owns Paypoint HR with his wife Karen, spent Thursday and Friday in Claremont, where he visited city departments and met with staff.
Campbell describes himself as “a numbers guy” who draws his findings strictly from statistical data and “apple to apple” comparisons.
“If the numbers say [a job title] is underpaid, then it’s easy to present,” Campbell told the council. “I’m an unbiased third party. I don’t know the employees, have favorites or know who is a great worker or a poor performer. These are just the numbers.”
Campbell will survey employees on a voluntary basis to learn what each person does on a day-to-day basis. He said that in many cases an employee’s job duties will differ from what one’s job description entails, and those duties are important when finding comparisons with positions in other communities.
As a validity check, Campbell has department heads review what the employees say, which reduces the risk of applying data based on an employee’s hope to influence a pay raise.
To assuage employee concerns, he uses this initial visit with departments to explain the study and encourage their participation. The strength of the analysis ties to having a quantity and breadth of data, Campbell explained.
In the second week of April, the consulting team will hold focus groups with city employees. Supervisors will not be present in these groups and participation will also be voluntary.
The consultant team will collect data from comparative New Hampshire communities within a 100-mile radius. “Comparative” data includes similarities in median household income, cost of living or housing prices.
“If the numbers show it’s a similar community, it is one,” Campell said.
Communities in Vermont or other neighboring states will not be considered because there are too many variables, such as differing tax systems and wage minimums, to ensure accurate comparisons.
Paypoint HR also helps the municipal client develop an implementation plan based on the analysis. Campbell said this plan will be highly individualized, based on each community’s financial situation and strategic vision.
“My job will be to determine the fiscal impact of what the budget would be,” Campbell said. “My numbers might come back with something that’s too much or not affordable, and that’s okay… a phase-in could be necessary. We help to do that.”
Councilor James Contois asked Claremont City Manager Ed Morris about how the city will handle a possible situation of city positions receiving higher compensation than their actual market value.
Morris said he would not want to reduce compensation in those situations, though the city might shift future pay raises, at least from merit-based positions, to positions where compensation is lagging.
Additionally, Morris said he has held “candid conversations” with union leaders about the city’s goal to ensure all employees are being fairly compensated.
“[I’ve said that] we really need to work at this as one organization,” Morris told the council. “And to understand that we would not renege on union contracts, but just to work together as a group to fix this as a whole.”
Morris said if the study finds some union positions being underpaid, the city would wish to renegotiate to improve that compensation.
The push to address the city’s lagging compensation for merit-pay employees began under former Interim City Manager John McLean, Morris said. While the council worked with McLean to make increases to the merit-pay scale, Morris said that building upon it with a comprehensive study will help the city create a consistent and fair pay system for all employees and hopefully reduce the loss of employees to higher-paying communities.
The city expects to have information from the study by the end of the summer. While the city will work on a compensation implementation plan during the next fiscal year, Morris said he wants to include some money in the proposed 2021 budget to adjust some salaries and wages sooner.
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