How HCM solves real challenges for municipalities

You manage the day-to-day and workforce operations of a Canadian municipality. But you also have an impact on the lives of the people who live, work, and play every day in your hometown.

Your impact is driven by a steadfast commitment to strategic planning, with a clear vision of both short-term and long-term objectives. This includes identifying the most suitable candidates, cultivating a capable workforce, and empowering your team to achieve success.

A lot of this work is accomplished through a municipality HCM system, but is your municipality’s HCM the right candidate for the job?

Are You Building a Better Payroll & HR Experience for Your Employees?

Your dedication to fostering sustainable change within your community is reflected in the policies and programs you create, the strategic work you develop, and your collaboration with other levels of government. In pursuit of this goal, you work with hundreds of employees who share your vision for creating a better community and workplace.

As you manage multiple departments across your municipality, it is no easy task to track employee hours and compile reports. It can become challenging to schedule each department in a different system, in turn making it hard for employees to access their information.

‍Unfortunately, you are not alone, as 60% of the public sector feeling like their HR Tech is being underutilized.

Manually entering full-time employee data in multiple systems, keeping track of pension plan contributions, and managing multiple pay rates can be time-consuming and complex.

As a result, 80% of business leaders like yourself agree that problems arise when there are different internal systems that don’t talk to each other, causing a lack of communication, bottlenecks, redundancy, or complacency.

But can you overcome these challenges?

Municipality HCM Challenge #1: Lack of scheduling visibility between departments

Scheduling employees for each department of a municipality takes a significant amount of time.‍

Manual Time Collection & Tracking

‍Are you tracking each employee on multiple spreadsheets with an ever building a paper trail? Let’s say you need different cost centres based on the type of work performed.

How do you manage that efficiently and accurately when working across various spreadsheets?

‍Here Comes the Seasonal Workforce

‍Summertime nears and everything is in bloom, and now it’s hiring season for all those seasonal workers. The burden of manual time collection is intensified with a casual workforce.

‍Now you have an influx of seasonal employees - volunteers, part-time and full-time - who may be working multiple positions in one day.

Are you hiring staff just to keep track of all that data? Simply because your current processes or systems aren’t accommodating for this scale of work?

‍Tracking Across Multiple GLs or Cost Centres

The responsibility of keeping track of employee hours across multiple cost centre spreadsheets can quickly become overwhelming. In fact, many organizations find themselves hiring additional staff just to manage the data entry, which only adds to payroll costs. Moreover, if an error occurs in tracking or costing, it can create significant challenges. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Gain Better Visibility Across All Your Administrative Operations

With the right municipal HCM system in place, you can integrate your time entry methods, municipal scheduling software, and payroll for all departments.

Automate schedules, and you determine who has access to each group’s schedule. Not to mention you can assign specific job codes or positions to the appropriate GLs automatically! So that means less chance for error, more time spent doing meaningful work, and one less data entry clerk to hire.

Municipality HCM Challenge #2: Manually applying changes to pension plan contributions each year

Effectively managing pension plan contributions for all eligible employees requires meticulous tracking. Since employees become eligible at different times throughout the year, constantly monitoring when to manually change the contribution rate can be a daunting task.

Digitally Transform Your Compensation and Benefits

By leveraging the right technology to drive your municipality's compensation and benefits strategy, you can streamline and automate the pension plan contribution process. This means that the contribution rate can automatically increase based on the rules and times you set up, eliminating the need for manual updates.

When managing this function through your municipality's HCM system, you empower your team to compile pension contribution reports with ease. This, in turn, provides you with greater visibility to confirm that the total amounts contributed by your employees align with the insurance or plan provider, ensuring that you remain compliant and avoid potential issues down the line.

Municipality HCM Challenge #3: HCM reporting spread across too many sources

Too Many Data Silos‍

Using fragmented systems for reporting tools often lead to silos between departments, resulting in a lack of communication that can lead to inconsistencies and inefficiencies. This is because each department tends to use its own tools or software, with no integration between systems.

This leads to a vicious cycle of manual data entry, endless spreadsheets, and the frustration of trying to make this information accessible between departments.

‍It takes a significant amount of time to track each department’s spreadsheet, export them, and then compile the reports manually.

The Single Source of Truth for Your Municipality’s HCM Reporting

By implementing strategic reporting for the entire workforce, manually compiling reports for all departments will no longer be a daunting task with one integrated system that talks to each other.

Municipality HCM Challenge #4: Employees can’t easily access their Payroll & HR information

With multiple systems, it is difficult for employees to access their information such as:

Pay statements
T4s and tax slips
Vacation time, entitlements, time off requests

On top of that, your department managers can’t produce or access the reports they need to see how their employees are doing and how well the department is operating.

As a result, this increases the administrative burden on those managers and your HR team.

All the Municipal Employee Information, All in One Place

Imagine a scenario where employees and managers could access everything they need through a user-friendly mobile app, with data being pulled in real-time. This would provide unparalleled ease of access for employees, enabling them to track their information on-demand and gain immediate fulfillment.

Municipality HCM Challenge #5: Managing multiple pay rates

Many municipalities have employees who work on rate grids that increase periodically or after a certain number of hours. When an employee has two positions with different rates of pay and rate grids, this becomes increasingly difficult to track.

How is your Payroll team keeping track? Is this all maintained in one big spreadsheet? Manually tracking this information is a big challenge; it’s prone to errors and, worse yet, what happens if that file goes missing or gets deleted?!

‍Payroll can’t depend on working from a static spreadsheet that doesn’t move with the speed of your operations. So how do you ensure employees are moving to the next pay rate grid at the right time, without the need for constant monitoring?

Automated Step Increases for Your Municipal Employees

Automate those step increases with an HCM that’s as dynamic as your municipality’s payroll and HR operations. When you have the right tools in place, it is much easier to manage multiple positions with different pay rate grids. When your pay structure is complicated, you need a solution that makes managing pay easier and helps your Payroll team work smarter, not harder.

To Innovate Your HR Tech, Look Beyond the Municipality HCM Niche

As a Canadian municipality, you are faced with a lot of challenges when it comes to implementing new processes and managing change to improve the employee experience. However, that innovative spirit is sometimes bound by the limitations of your niche systems.

Having an integrated system that aligns with your operations will create an easier workflow for all employees across departments. That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be labeled as public sector software.

‍Understand your needs. Identify what’s working, what isn’t, and what could be better. Here’s a checklist to get you started.

‍It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks of managing a municipality, sometimes those tasks cause a detour in your strategic plan.

It’s time to elevate your municipality’s HR tech strategy.

More Municipality HCM Resources from Avanti

Over a dozen Canadian Municipalities use Avanti to pay, develop, and manage their employees.

Avanti's integrated HCM solution streamlines employee management, automates scheduling, pension contributions, reporting, and data accessibility. Say goodbye to fragmented systems and hello to workforce success.