One Plus One Equals A Common Goal: Discussions and Perspectives on Workforce Development From Two Sides of the Workforce

A passionate and consistent workforce is critical to ensuring a successful water/wastewater industry for years to come. The high-level goals of this presentation is: -Understand what employees value in their careers. -Hear how they are feeling on a wide range of topics including flexibility, mentorship, workload, and team support. -Learn what changes they desire to increase their motivation and contentment. The objective of this presentation is help create a better workplace for employee retention. This presentation will offer perspectives on workforce development from two sides of the workforce. Kathleen Mannion is considered a 'rising professional' with 7 years of experience all in the consulting industry. Molly Nause-McCord is considered a 'seasoned professional' with 13 years of experience all in the public sector working for the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. In addition to their own perspectives, this presentation will offer the insight that Molly and Kathleen learned from a survey they sent out to other members of the industry. The survey was anonymous, consisting of 25 short answer questions on a wide variety of topics including experience level and duration, motivations for joining the field, employee engagement, and professional development. Kathleen and Molly widely distributed the survey to get a diverse set of respondents. The distribution included via email list serves sent by the Pacific Northwest Clean Water Association, as well as distribution through Kathleen and Molly's networks. There was a lot of interest in the survey and 159 responses were received while the survey was open in July and August 2023. There was good representation amongst the respondents across sectors (52% public sector, 43% consulting, and 5% other), years of experience (22% 0-5 years of experience, 20% 5-10 years of experience, 20% 5-10 years of experience, and 28% of 20+ years of experience), and gender (53% female, 41% male, and 6% all others). After reading through the thoughtful responses and survey results, the information was categorized into four categories: -Individual to Industry: how individuals view the water/wastewater industry including their motivations for joining, motivations for staying, confidence that they will remain in the industry, and greatest challenges they see for the industry moving forward. -Employee Contentment: evaluated how content employees are, how that compared across different demographics and groups, and what is contributing to employee contentment. -Mentorship and Growth: assessed how employees are feeling about themselves as a mentor, relationships they have with their own mentors, and obstacles that are preventing further mentorship. -Airing of Grievances: understanding the top contributors to employee dissatisfaction at work including amount of workload, lack of recognition, monotonous tasks, and personal work/life balance. We also evaluated how this varied across different groups, races, and demographics. This presentation will present the results of the survey, as well as the personal input from Kathleen and Molly and their differing backgrounds. Overall, the results from the survey were very positive with 73% of respondents listing themselves as content and engaged. A Gallup poll from the first half of 2021 stated that 36% of workers in the United States were engaged. Therefore, this shows that the water/wastewater work force is significantly more engaged and content than the rest of society. However, there were helpful takeaways from this presentation highlighting areas for improvement to further progress the workplace. This presentation was given at the Pacific Northwest Clean Water Association (PNCWA) annual conference in September 2023 and received lots of positive feedback. The attendees had several questions and stayed after the presentation to discuss more. The presentation was given a 30-minute time slot at the PNCWA conference, but attendees recommended a longer time slot in the future to dive further into the survey results. If the Conference Planning Committee has any specific areas of the survey results that they would like the presentation to focus on we would be happy to tailor our presentation as requested.