A new report from the Office of the City Auditor recommends the City of Edmonton look at its growing number of supervisor positions if it wants to cut spending.
“The city must reduce its costs in order to remain sustainable in the current economic environment,” the report says. “Since 2017, the workforce has grown each year and supervisory FTE (full-time equivalent positions) have grown disproportionately high compared to non-supervisory FTE.
“Reversing this growth by reducing supervisory FTE is an effective way to reduce costs for the organization.”
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The review notes that over the past three years, middle manager positions within the city have increased by 22 per cent while the number of front-line supervisor positions has gone up by 19 per cent.
“Clearly the auditor has found that there are more supervisors than we need in this organization” Mayor Don Iveson said on Thursday. “We will have to shed some supervisory positions across the corporation to bring things back into balance.
“We’re going to need a lot of co-operation — unusual co-operation — from our labour unions, because quite a number of those supervisory positions are union positions, they’re not all management positions.”
While the report pointed to supervisor positions as a potential target for the city if it wants to reduce costs, it noted the city would need to balance different considerations if going down that route.
“It is important for the organization to have the right amount of supervisors,” the document says. “When there are too few supervisors, it can be difficult to properly manage staff and workload. This can negatively impact the quality of work.
“When there are too many supervisors, this can unnecessarily raise overall personnel costs and create bureaucracy for decision-making.”
The report finds that between 2017 and 2020, “there was a shift towards supervising smaller groups of employees.”
“There were fewer supervisors in charge of groups of 10 employees or more, and more supervisors in charge of groups of less than 10 employees,” the document says.
The report found that budgeted personnel costs at the city have gone up by $63 million since 2017.
“Overall, the workforce has grown by two per cent and the cost of the workforce has grown by 5.6 per cent,” the audit concludes.
“The higher rate of cost growth is primarily due to three factors: a shift to higher-cost positions, negotiated wage increases for unionized employees who comprise 86 per cent to 88 per cent of the workforce and increases for employees who were not at the top of their salary range.”
The report notes that “management, out-of-scope and professional positions have not had increases to salary ranges since 2016.”
According to modelling done by the authors of the report, a two per cent reduction in supervisors could see the city save $5.3 million while a 15 per cent reduction could save Edmonton about $39.6 million.
Interim city manager Adam Laughlin said the City of Edmonton welcomes the recommendations and findings in the report.
“We’ve always committed to continuous improvement and that includes reviewing the number, cost and composition of our workforce,” he said in a news release.
“Historically, the city has used a number of strategies to ensure our workforce was the right size and composition to effectively serve Edmontonians. Most recently in 2019, we conducted a thorough review of all vacant positions, developed an organizational framework to ensure our teams were the right size with the right accountabilities at the right level, and completed a number of program and service reviews to improve our service delivery and to identify areas where costs could be reduced.”
Laughlin noted that since the audit was completed, Edmonton has faced significant fiscal challenges as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and an ongoing slump in energy prices.
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“Our new reality requires a new orientation to our work,” he said. “We need to make intelligent but sometimes difficult choices to respond to the challenges that we are facing.
“The city is a large and complex organization and any changes will be made in a thoughtful way.”
The audit will be discussed by councillors who sit on the audit committee on Sept. 18.
–With files from Global News’ Breanna Karstens-Smith