There has been a lot of chatter about Indianola’s public works department over the past few weeks.
Piles of trash and limbs have been left unchecked on the sides of city streets for weeks at a time, and some of the patch jobs on the frequent potholes are poor at best.
The Board of Aldermen had multiple discussions about public works at its last meeting, one in particular about employees who are not logging a full 40 hours of work.
Of course, there are reasons for a lot of the absences. People get sick. People go on vacation.
And there are probably some who simply are taking advantage of the system.
But there are employees at public works, believe it or not, who are working, and they are working in some of the worst heat in the last century.
Aside from battling the sun, there are other challenges that face leadership at public works, and other departments around the county.
Chief among those is the issue of labor.
Any boss will tell you that it’s getting harder and harder to find people who want to work, and it gets even more difficult when management is unable to offer competitive pay.
Still, if someone takes a job, they should be prepared to complete their duties as prescribed during training.
Training, itself, is a big issue in our county.
Departments like public works, road crews and the like have a difficult task of trying to train new employees, on sometimes sophisticated equipment, while at the same time trying to put out a million fires a day.
Employees need, and often desire, direction. They tend to be happier when they know what to do and when they are told what to do.
We would like to see our county and municipal leaders come together to create municipal and county workforce training classes and require certifications to be completed within six months or a year of employment.
New hires could attend these classes a few hours each week and then work in the field the rest of the time. These classes would cross-train employees on all equipment required to operate under the job description.
We would also like to see a better route scheduling system for public works.
There’s no excuse for entire sections of the city going weeks without attention.
Better training will lead to more efficiency and more work being done; but most importantly, it will lead to more fulfillment and happier employees.
Better preparation and efficiency cuts down on hurried patch jobs and mistakes that lead to the same job having to be done multiple times.
Better scheduling, systems and processes will ensure that all areas of the city are touched in some kind of way Monday through Friday. Citizens don’t expect everything to be done in a week.
They know there’s a million things to do and only a few working hours to do them, but they do expect to see some kind of action over the course of five days.
Kudos to the public works employees who were out this past Saturday picking up trash along the streets, but better efficiency Monday through Friday would keep employees home with their families on Saturdays, barring an emergency.
Coming up with better training and processes seems like an insurmountable task right now, given the number of tasks currently undone, but taking time to focus on this now will make life better for management, employees and the citizens in the long term.
