Town council passed a revised personnel policy at its meeting last week, allowing for six steps on the compensation grid before an employee tops out at a given position.
While a majority of amendments to the policy were made earlier this year in May, the section regarding the movement on the compensation grid was deferred to allow a group of staff to do some research on what other communities in Alberta are doing in a similar vein.
“There's a grouping of municipalities that Municipal Affairs uses to compare and contrast a whole number of things. So they looked at the wages and benefits from that grouping and came up with some recommendations that this workout group brought back to our leadership team on how employees with the Town of Olds should move on our grids,” said Norm McInnis, the town's chief administrative officer.
Previously, the policy didn't specify how an employee would move up in the grid – that was up to a supervisor based on annual evaluations of employees.
“Our previous personnel policy really didn't have any language on that,” McInnis said.
In order to formulate the policy, all of the job descriptions at the Town of Olds were revamped. Then, in consultation with a consultant on the project, that information was compared to what other communities of a similar size in Alberta have as a compensation package for similar jobs. The town then came up with a six-step range of compensation which employees will work through before topping out after six years.
The review of the compensation portion of the policy had been ongoing since May. New hires won't necessarily start at Step 1. Depending on their experience and level of competency in a given position, they could start at Step 3, for example, but they would top out in three years, in that case, McInnis said.
