Kenney to improve city's Human Resources Department
Mayor Kenney wants to bring the city's Human Resources Department into 2016. To that end, he has tasked his newly appointed chief administrative officer with improving training and recruitment efforts within human resources to benefit the city's 25,000-plus workers.
Mayor Kenney wants to bring the city's Human Resources Department into 2016.
To that end, he has tasked his newly appointed chief administrative officer with improving training and recruitment efforts within human resources to benefit the city's 25,000-plus workers.
"We want to make it the best city workforce it can possibly be, and that requires some innovative thinking and thinking beyond what was prescribed in the Charter from 1951," said Rebecca Rhynhart, named to the newly created chief administrative officer position.
To make that happen, Rhynhart will now oversee human resources - an office that, as stipulated in the city's charter reports directly to the Civil Service Commission.
Rhynhart says she respects the charter and will be coordinating with, not directing, human resources. That distinction is causing some confusion and concern within the Civil Service Commission.
"We're trying to figure out, what does it mean for her office to coordinate duties the Civil Service Commission has always been responsible for," Civil Service Commissioner Chair Doris A. Smith said this week. "We need to work out, is this really coordination or direct supervision? That's where the disagreement may be."
Smith and a fellow commissioner, Lynda Orfanelli, sent a letter to the city solicitor in January, concerned that the move violated the charter.
Rhynhart says that it does not and that the human resources director - Albert L. D'Attilio - will continue to report to the Civil Service Commission.
"There's no attempt to take away the Civil Service Commission's role here," she said.
Rhynhart's office isn't only involved with human resources; it also will help improve several often overlooked departments such as procurement, public property, the office of information technology, fleet and contracting.
Rhynhart's deputy - Jackie Linton - will focus on human resources.
Linton, a veteran of the corporate human resources world, previously headed the managing director's now-defunct Center for Excellence, which provided development training otherwise unavailable to city workers.
Linton's focus will be to bring much of what the Center of Excellence did into the city's human resources office. She wants to streamline the "onboarding" process for new hires, amp up training, and be more strategic about recruitment.
Currently, new employees receive very basic training in things such as compliance and sexual harassment law, Linton said. She wants to supplement that with training on project management and leadership skills.
Recruitment is also lacking in many departments, Linton said.
"In my vision we'd have a professional recruiting team who know how to go out and recruit people, know where to go, working in the communities to let people know about jobs, assessing how we market our jobs to see if we're getting to the right people."
Linton commended the current human resources staff but said she expects that the initiatives will require additional hires for the 82-member department.
"There's a whole staff of very talented people up there who do a heroic job of getting things done with very little resources. It's not to say the people up there are not doing a good job," she said. "We just want to modernize the things we're doing."
Rhynhart - the former budget director under then-Mayor Nutter - said her office will oversee improvements in other departments, as well.
She is working with the office of procurement to get its bidding system online.
"Many bids we only get two responses back, it shouldn't be that way," Rhynhart said. "A lot of people think procurement is a dry topic but there's a lot of money involved and it could go a long way in helping Philly businesses."
In public property, Rhynhart has plans to use software to track all city space in one online directory. Currently, keeping tabs on who occupies what space is a pen-and-paper process.
"The goal is to consolidate certain city office space," she said, "which would eventually either save money or give us the saved costs of not having to lease somewhere."
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