After earning an engineering degree in Turkey, Berke Attila studied business and finance in Maryland. He worked for the City of Baltimore for nearly a decade before becoming the chief human resources officer for Montgomery County in September 2019. The county borders all of Northwest Washington, D.C., making it the home of much of the federal government workforce and headquarters for several federal agencies. This interview was conducted via video a day later than planned due to an ongoing union negotiation. It has been condensed and slightly reordered for clarity.
I was curious about the collective bargaining session that caused us to reschedule. What were the issues, and how were they resolved?
This was about compensation for our police, and we were focusing on retention and recruitment.
It’s a seller’s market right now, as you know, and when people are making choices, it’s not only just compensation but work-life balance. So, we were finding ways to address the whole police officers’ journey.
That required us to talk through things like where some of the pressure points are. I mean, are we seeing most of the exodus in the early years or seasoned years? We also want to look at how earnings stack up against other jurisdictions’ and what other incentives there are.
This wasn’t adversarial. We adopted the concept of interest-based bargaining where we talked about aligned interests and where we want to be before looking at our options for solutions and generating an agreement. At that point, it just became a numbers game.
I am glad that we didn’t have to go to arbitration. Now, the agreement goes to the council, and I hope they’ll approve.
Has retention and pay come up with other groups of workers with the county?
Oh yeah. Today, we were at a council committee hearing about transit operators and bus drivers. We put forward a request for a supplemental appropriation to do some salary adjustments for current drivers and transit supervisors so the county would be more competitive with WMATA, the D.C. Metro system that also operates in Maryland and Virginia.
We know the importance of public transportation to provide equity for underrepresented populations, and bringing transit schedules back to where they were before the pandemic requires a lot of drivers. To be honest with you, we’ve been struggling to keep them and attract them.
Have the issues with recruiting and retention been mostly about compensation, or are there other concerns you’re hearing from employees and candidates?
Though compensation is one of the contributing factors, it’s not the sole one. I think the COVID pandemic changed people’s lifestyle enough to lead them to see a different way of balancing work and life. Their priorities are shifted.
You know, “Time is short. I might lose loved ones. The level of stress and risk that come with the pay is not what I want.”
Then, I think, some employers didn’t really empathize with employees’ needs for psychological and physical safety. Employers didn’t meet employees where they are. They didn’t train them, but just dialed up demands on them and left them on their own.
So, some people came to the realization, “You know, this is not for me. And it’s not about compensation. I’m just gonna try the job market.”
Now, the number one question is not, “How much do you pay me?” Instead, it’s, “What’s your culture?” or “How do you approach hybrid work? Do you allow remote work?”
What sort of answers can the county provide as far as work life balance goes?
Well, what we’ve wanted to really focus on is to wake up and smell the coffee and say we are not going to be able to stay competitive if we don’t seriously up our game in terms of remote work because, geopolitically, where we’re located means we’re competing for talent in the federal government space. Federal contractors are remote, and the second Amazon headquarters is coming in.
Although our salaries have been competitive, we’ve been hearing more of those questions about work-life balance and what we do for benefits, which are actually really good.
Still, our attrition has increased. We have somewhat of an older employee base, with an average age of 47, and we’ve started seeing a lot of turnover among employees with zero to five years of service.
For long-term employees, their thinking is, “I don’t need to do this anymore. I mean, I’m eligible to retire, and I’m gonna retire and take on a job that is less stressful. Maybe that’s not paying as much, but I am eligible to retire.”
It’s scary, to be honest with you.
How are your workforce numbers holding up? Are there enough employees to meet the responsibilities?
We’re still surviving. But the problem is we’re starting to ask so much more from those who stay. Which is one of the things that we’re focusing on right now because in the government space, hiring is never as fast as in the private sector.
We’re working to be more effective and efficient in bringing on the right people at the right time, but the fact is it’s a lot easier to quit than it is to bring somebody on. No matter what you do, there’s this gap during which extra responsibilities fall on remaining employees.
We’re trying to focus more on leadership development, from supervisor all the way up to the CEO-kinds of department heads, and to create an empathy for what it really means to say, “Those two people have left, but our responsibility to the constituents hasn’t changed.”
If we can understand the workload, we can shift priorities and be open to communicating about what we can do to make work lives better.
Providing training on clear communications is one of the things that we’re trying because managers need to make sure employees know they’re not being taken for granted. If we don’t really pay attention to those who are left to do the job and put all of our attention toward hiring new people, we might lose even more employees before we bring new ones on.
You mentioned empathy, and I know that can be in short supply in the middle of a pandemic and increased workloads. Has there been any specific management training to, as you said, meet employees and candidates where they are?
We are working on it, and we have other ways of communicating with employees constantly. One of the things that we immediately introduced at the onset of the pandemic and that we continue to do because it has worked so well was live weekly online team events where the leaders communicate with employees on changing rules and regulations and guidance from the state, CDC, etc.
It has helped for managers to be vulnerable in front of employees—to say, “We don’t have all the answers, but we will make sure you are heard and we know what you’re going through.”
The meetings also allow employees to be a part of the decision-making process because it’s an open forum where they can ask questions. While there’s limited time to answer in real time, we update FAQs on the HR webpage. And we bring in subject matter experts.
We want to be open and honest with employees and to create spaces for people to understand issues like burnout and how to manage and work effectively in a remote environment.
Usually, meetings last an hour, with about 30 minutes for a briefing, 15 minutes of dos and don’ts, and another 15 minutes of frequently asked questions. A moderator looks at the chat and passes along questions. This structure allows us to put our thumb on the heart rate of the population, to assess anxiety and see where employees’ focuses are. Like, when questions show employees are burned out, it’s a signal for us to come up with a training or deploy mental health resources.
We’ve moved from weekly to monthly meetings, and they continue to create a lot of value for two reasons. They make employees feel part of the pandemic response, and they show that leadership is working for them.
To shift the conversation a little bit, are these the sorts of issues you pictured yourself dealing with when you were studying engineering as an undergrad?
Not at all! But one thing that translated well into public finance and then human capital management is, I would say, scientific thinking, or really understanding the problem before jumping into a solution.
In science, you have a problem and you have a perceived result that you want to achieve. You create a hypothesis and you test it. You need to be agile in your mindset and then be adaptive in your strategy. If a solution doesn’t work, don’t feel bad. Be happy because you now possess wisdom and can fail forward.
A great anecdote I always use is when I was interviewing for a graduate assistantship at the University of Baltimore and meeting with Professor Hossein Arsham. He asked me, “Can you please name three United States presidents who are not buried in United States soil?”
And I was just like, “Oh, I … that’s a very complex question. I don’t know the answer. and I might need to do research.”
And he says, “You’re wrong. You didn’t understand the problem. I never said they are dead.”
So, I was like, “Oh, okay.” Anybody who is still alive that’s been a president is not buried in the United States.
And that’s when I understood we need to be focused on results. Like, if a civil engineer is asking you to develop a material that’s going to withstand a certain resistance, rather than saying, “That material cannot do this,” talk with them about why they chose this particular material.
Right? With the end goal in sight, you shift problems to the lens of the customer that you’re serving. This perspective shift has really helped me ask people at the county, “What are your pain points? What are you under stress for? How is your budget aligned with what you’re trying to do? Help me understand.”
I realized a while ago that working with people in a way that really makes an impact is a kind of a passion for me. Any organization’s biggest budget is the people, and if you look at Montgomery County, 80 percent of our costs are personnel-related. So, no matter how much money you throw at a problem, if you’re not working with the right people you cannot succeed. You need to attract the right people to do the right job and invest in current personnel’s personal and professional development while creating a safe physical and psychological environment for them to thrive.
Doing this type of work really gives me a lot of pleasure because whatever the problem is, I’m working with and for people.
Your passion is obvious and kind of contagious. You mentioned investing in people and I think that gives us a way to wrap up. You have invested in people outside of work through the Chesapeake Language Project. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Of course. The story of the Chesapeake Language Project is that I was in a space in my career that I had a little bit too much free time on my hands on the weekends. And I said, you know, I could be more useful to society.
I looked at opportunities to serve on a nonprofit board or volunteer, but I didn’t really know what would permit me to give back while using my skills. Then, a couple of my friends who are ESL teachers came to me with an idea about creating a project to empower immigrant youth by helping them develop language skills.
This really sounded good. One of the proposals that had stayed with me from my time working in the Baltimore budget office involved early childhood education. The proposal cited research showing that if you want to increase high school graduation rates, you absolutely need to invest in third-grade reading.
The ESL teachers didn’t have an awareness of how to build up an organization in terms of leasing a building, securing financing and doing accounting, so I brought those capabilities.
The mission of the Chesapeake Language Project (CLP) is to increase educational opportunities for immigrant students in Maryland by:
- Offering scholarships to immigrant students who graduate from a Maryland high school for post-secondary studies
- Providing guidance to immigrant students regarding educational options and opportunities through a comprehensive mentorship program
- Increasing immigrant families’ access to educational resources
- Strengthening support services through culturally-responsive professional learning for educators and community partners
Our organization is somewhat small, but it’s growing. Right now, I’m applying for grants because more money allows us to do more good. —N
01 March 2022
Category
HR News Article