Working for the City of Winfield, Jamie Chism is a decade into his third career. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, Chism did case management for children receiving Kansas state services. He has also held adjunct faculty positions at Friends University in Wichita and at Southwestern College in his past and present hometown. He spoke with IPMA-HR via Zoom in early May. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. I know you’re very busy and have a small HR team there. Sort of walk me through a typical workday.
Yeah. There is nothing typical about a workday, especially with this smaller group. We all wear different hats, and, actually, I’m down to just me and a generalist. So, there are a lot of duties we spread around and share.
At this point, my generalist is about two months old. I lost my previous one to another job. So, we’re in the process of training him up.
Each morning, we come and we’re juggling between our safety issues and training. We’re also doing open enrollment soon, so we’re currently negotiating our benefit structure.
Then, we have our recruiting issues with massive retirements coming up. All the baby boomers are looking at retirement, and we’ve had quite a bit of turnover in last three years—more than usual—simply for that reason.
How many people work for the city?
We currently have about 175 full-time employees and, right now, about 50 seasonal workers.
You mentioned that you’ve had a lot of turnover. Are there many open positions?
With such a small workforce, a lot of turnover for us is 5-10 in a year. Normally, if we don’t have retirements, we don’t have much turnover at all because this is a really good place to work. There’s a very good atmosphere, and we’re family-focused as an organization.
Usually, once we get somebody to work for us, they stay until they retire. Unfortunately, what that means for us, and what we’re looking at right now, is every 20 years, we have a lot of people retiring.
And with the small population of Winfield, your local recruiting pool is a little smaller, as well.
We usually hover around 12,500 residents, so, yes, we’ve had to utilize social media quite a bit to get a longer reach for our recruiting efforts outside of our immediate area and fill some of our open positions.
That leads into a second set of questions about how you balance all the different responsibilities. Social media, of course, helps with recruiting, but then there’s the time involved in hiring and onboarding. Where do you find time in the day? Are there any tricks, any tools, you use?
We just kind of tackle it as it comes, trying to prioritize what is due first. Right now, that is recruiting because of our need to fill seasonal positions. Thankfully, my HR generalist handles most of the onboarding and recruiting of our seasonals, which frees me up to focus on some other things.
Have you introduced any sort of HR technology to streamline processes?
We have. We recently adopted a new human resources information system that is very robust. It has an employee side where they can make changes to their W-4s and things like that. Employees can also view their checks and total compensation remotely, which eases quite a bit the stress of day-to-day, one-on-one interactions over those issues.
From an HR standpoint, the new HRIS includes tools for recruiting and provides us our own website for updating position descriptions. It’s been a very good upgrade for us.
Something that caught my eye when I was looking at your LinkedIn profile is, in addition to running HR for the city, you’ve been involved in college teaching. What courses have you taught?
I’ve mostly taught basic employment law and human resources practices. I’ve also led seminars on strategic thinking where we go into organizational development and a lot of the philosophy behind approaches to employment law and its application within an organization.
Those subjects are really kind of my things. I’m more on the legal side of HR, “just the facts.” The softer part, I’m not so strong in. I’m formerly a Marine, so I struggle with that emotional side a little bit.
Well, compliance is a huge part of HR.
Yes, and, really, that’s what motivated me to get into human resources.
Coming up through the workforce and seeing where policies weren’t applied equally across the workforce and watching people find ways around certain policies, that’s what motivated me to get into a position where I would have at least a say in ensuring we have an environment of equality within the organization where all rules apply to everyone.
It makes sense that coming from the military, you would understand that when rules are in place and followed and enforced equally, that creates equity.
Absolutely. And consistency, too, gives a person a sense of safety within their environment. When employees know what to expect, it automatically charges an environment with the ability to function more steadily and more efficiently.
What motivated you to start teaching?
I love the classroom. I love going to school. I hate paying back the loans, but I love going to school.
I love to interact with people and have good debates on issues. Once I graduated with my master’s, I decided I wanted to continue that in teaching.
I didn’t feel like getting a Ph.D. was something I wanted to do in terms of spending the additional money. It didn’t seem there’d be a big return on the investment.
So, to keep myself in the classroom interacting with students and exchanging ideas, I went back to both my alma maters for my bachelor’s and master’s and taught for both of those colleges.
If someone is reading your profile and has the idea, “Hey, maybe I’d like to get into teaching,” do you have any advice for how to pursue that?
Just go for it. I think everybody has the ability to teach. Anybody who’s been in workforce for a while, that is.
There are so many young people in the college system who are hungry for real advice about what is going on. I think people who are adjunct instructors offer a unique view to those students because they are full-time professionals and part-time professors.
I think anybody looking to get into the college classroom as a teacher should just take a chance, believe in themselves and put their credentials in for a position. The school will probably give them a call because most schools are looking for instructors with real-world experience.
Have you hired any former students?
Yes. What’s really funny is my current HR generalist was an intern for me about five years ago while he was going through Southwestern College completing a human resources degree. I just hired him back two months ago.
So, you sort of create your own talent pipeline.
Absolutely. As a college teacher, you can identify young people who are going through college as high-potential individuals, and you can keep an eye on them. Even if you don’t hire them, you can still encourage them and stay in contact to open doors for them with your own contacts.
Another thing that really jumped out from your LinkedIn profile, and it’s related to teaching and training, is—let me get this correctly—“management of aggressive behavior.” With you being a Marine, I have a mental image of what that might entail. But, of course, that’s not exactly HR-appropriate.
No, [laughs] it isn’t.
Say somebody is acting out in the workplace. What are some things managers and coworkers should know and do?
Actually, the funny part of that is before I went into HR, I was a case worker for some very emotionally disturbed children. So, that was one of the classes I would teach other case workers—how to deescalate an escalatory or emotional individual without causing any harm.
First of all, you need to identify where that person is. While trying to find a way to deescalate, interact with the person verbally. It’s a discussion practice, as opposed to any kind of physical practice.
I don’t want to put you on the spot, but have there been occasions with the city to defuse situations that might have boiled over?
Not with the City of Winfield. I’ve not had that issue. Which is probably why I’m still here.
I’ve been here for nine years, going on 10. This is one of the most positive environments that I’ve been in. We really approach everything with a family-first attitude. It’s just a good place to work, and I’ve never had to go into that de-escalation tool bag since I’ve been here.
Great. And not to put words in your mouth at all, but the way I heard that was, “A supportive culture, a positive culture, goes a long way toward keeping things calm in the workplace and avoiding conflict.”
Yes, and that’s all done through our leadership.
We’re only as good as the people who lead the organization. I believe our current city manager is extremely supportive of families, of issues that happen within families. We have employees who have children who are dealing with issues, and they need some time off or flexibility within their schedule to deal with those.
Our leadership all the way down is absolutely supportive of doing what we need to do to make sure our employees are able to handle their issues in an efficient and positive way, and then come back to work with us.
To completely change subjects, you’re right now serving as president of the IPMA-HR Central Region. I’m curious why you decided to take on that leadership role.
I joined IPMA-HR when I came to the city and immediately found myself surrounded by really great people who were part of the Kansas Chapter, the Missouri Chapter and the region. They helped me see how being in the Association lends you knowledge of the HR profession and gains you support from other HR professionals as you move through your career. Membership provides different tools and education.
I wanted to continue being a part of that. And, to be completely honest, I was just hanging out with all the people who have been in these positions. As they rolled over into retirement or served their stint, it kind of just came to the point where I was next in line to take a leadership position.
As we speak, you’re gearing up for the region’s annual conference, starting June 5. How is everything coming together?
It is coming together much better than I anticipated. This is my first time doing anything like this.
Thankfully, I have past-presidents helping me out. Past-presidents of the Central Region and even one of the members of the national Executive Council have helped. I have a handful of professionals, about 10, assisting. Which is amazing.
Do you have anything special planned? A bounce house, maybe?
You know, [laughs] a bounce house would be good.
A couple of the things we’re going to do that should be pretty cool are a president’s reception with a live band, and it’s at a casino.
We’re also raffling off room reimbursements for people who stay through the last day. The room reimbursements will cover winners’ entire stay. And we’re giving away a three-day weekend at a resort lake house that sleeps 16.
I think we’ve provided a lot of incentives for people to attend, and we hope people will take advantage of the learning and networking opportunities.
That takes us through the work-related questions. Now, it doesn’t sound like you have a lot of time off, but when you do get a day to yourself, how do spend that time?
When I get my days off, my wife and I love to go fishing. We live out in the country by two ponds and a river, and we have a side-by-side [a two-person ATV]. Whenever we get the time, and usually during the summer, we’ll jump on the side-by-side and just go fishing.
Hanging out on the bank, fishing and just enjoying each other’s company. She’s my best friend, so that’s what we do.
Sounds great.
It’s amazing here. I’ve been all over the world, having been in the military. In fact, I grew up in Kansas and couldn’t wait to get out of here. But then I ended up right back in Kansas after having children. Understanding the rest of the world, the rest of the country, I realized my neighbors are the nicest people. And it’s just calm; it’s slow. I love this area. —N
01 June 2022
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HR News Article