How do we make our staffing plans match the needs and expectations of our organizations? On this show Daniel Neville-Rehbehn, Director of Customer Experience at the Salt Lake City Public Library, talks about the importance of creating staffing plans that optimize our most valuable resources, our people. (You can access Daniel’s spreadsheet below.)
Transcript
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Adriane Herrick Juarez:
This is Adriane Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast where we talk about libraries and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations, and strategic insights in the profession.
How do we make our staffing plans match the needs and expectations of our organizations? On this show Daniel Neville-Rahbehn, Director of Customer Experience at the Salt Lake City Public Library, talks about the importance of creating staffing plans that optimize our most valuable resources—our people.
Enjoy the show!
Daniel, welcome to the show.
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: Thank you so much for being here. Today we are talking about evaluating staffing plans. Staffing plans are foundational to our ability to function well in our organizations. How do these align the work of our valuable human resources with our organizational values and beliefs? 01:22
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
It’s really easy to write down some nice sounding words and call them your values and beliefs, but what I think is so important about intentionally considering your staffing plans is—that is where those values and beliefs really start to come to life. You can talk a really great game about prioritizing staff wellbeing, but if you’ve understaffed your buildings, all that is—is talk. For me, the exciting thing is that as leaders, we are in a position to actually do something about that, and that starts with understanding the issue.
The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. That’s followed by a lot of work to figure out what a solution looks like and how to implement it, but you have to start with realizing where you’re falling short.
I also want to call out the importance of your beliefs and values as an individual leader, because we carry those with us and they do shape a lot of what we do. When I think about staffing, you know, big picture, I know I have a few beliefs and values that I have developed over my career. One, clear is kind. You know, it’s really important for staff to know what is expected of them and what they can expect of their leaders. When things are murky or ambiguous that can slip into inequities and exploitation real quickly.
This is important to me because, number two, I deeply believe people should be paid for the work that they do. I think the whole concept of vocational awe is incredibly toxic, especially when that starts to influence how folks are compensated for the work. Yes, what we do is important. No, people shouldn’t be asked to do more for less because of that.
The third thing is people shouldn’t be doing work that isn’t needed. This is a bit of a flip side to the previous one. We do get to do really cool things at the library, and that’s great. However, it is also important for us as leaders to understand where the boundaries are so we can make sure the needs of the organization and the community are being cared for— that we’re being responsible stewards of public funds, and that our staff aren’t slipping into doing work that they aren’t being compensated for because—see that previous value about people needing to be paid for the work that they do.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: I appreciate that you are articulating both your personal and professional leadership values to create the staffing plans you’re talking about. What are the overall goals of creating staffing plans? 03:54
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
As we dug into really looking at our staffing structures, we had the three things that we wanted to keep in mind along the way and ultimately were able to find a way to address. First, we wanted to create clear and consistent expectations of all of our public service roles. This really recognized that over time, across our system, the expectations of our staff diverged and evolved based on who the manager was, the needs of the specific location, etc. While we don’t want all of our locations to be exactly the same cookie cutter experience, we do want to create a consistent through line, or foundation to the experience in our spaces, and that starts with consistent expectations.
The second thing—we wanted to provide appropriate support structures for staff to be successful. Once we clarify what we expect of staff, then we can identify what supports or trainings we need to provide for them to be successful. For example, if we expect everyone working our service desks to be fully skilled on our ILS, then we should make sure we have a good training on how to use our ILS. The same thing goes for reader’s advisory or basic manager skills.
The third thing we wanted to work towards was ensuring accountability. I don’t believe it’s fair to hold someone accountable to an expectation they were not aware of, but once an expectation is made clear, I have found those hard conversations become a lot easier. This was what was expected of you. This is where that didn’t happen. How can we help you meet that expectation going forward?
The reason we wanted to focus on these three things first, is because once those expectations are clear and realistic, you can use them to evaluate where your staffing model is now and what changes you might need to make in the future, and ultimately create that long-term vision and plan. And that’s really where we wanted to get with this project.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: As we evaluate our staffing plans, how do we identify the work that needs to be done? 06:00
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
This can feel tricky because so much of what we do and the impact we have feels unquantifiable. How do you measure the joy a child gets from storytime? You know, that’s kind of hard. But, if you look closely, there are many things that are objectively quantifiable. How many hours are you open? How many items need to be shelved? How many programs do you do? There’s a lot more of our day-to-day work that is quantifiable than you might expect at first glance, and we were also able to use the expectations document that we created with our staff to help inform how we thought about the work that needs to be done.
For example, we expect our librarians to contribute to the management of our collection, so that means we need to consider the size of our collection as we try to capture the breadth of the work that needs to be done. Some of that is very directly correlated, like the number of service desks and the hours that you’re open. And, some of it is a bit more of a proxy data point—like that collection number, or looking at the number of management hours per staff member. But for the most part, in the long run, we were able to capture, at a high level, a broad, you know, what the community expected of us as an organization.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: And we can’t implement staffing plans all at once. What should we expect in terms of the time it takes to engage in this work? 07:21
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
Before this project, we had fallen into an annular cycle around our budget. Staffing requests were framed more of a, What do I think I can get next year, or what can I make a case for right now? As we looked on our staffing models and went through this evaluation, we realized that frame was causing us to be a bit myopic in our thinking. Taking that constraint away and asking our managers to envision a more abundant future, say five years out, unlocked a completely different conversation. At that point, it wasn’t about responding to the immediate moment, or thinking about the staff we currently have and where they want to go. It became more about what staff positions do we need to truly thrive as an organization, helping us create a North Star plan that we could use in our annual budget cycle to prioritize the many, many requests we have to balance each year.
The thing about a North Star is that you can never actually reach it. Our plan with this is to revisit this plan in the lead-up to each of our budget cycles, evolve it based on the information that we have and how things have shifted over the past year, and then to use that information to figure out what is the best, most impactful staffing request that we can include in that year when we’re able to include staffing requests. So though we’re never actually going to reach an ideal state because that is impossible, we should be getting closer each year.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: How can library leaders clarify expectations with staff surrounding staffing plans? 08:58
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
Two things first. First, you have to involve your staff in the process, otherwise there’s going to be no buy-in for those expectations. And two, you also have to have a pretty small group to actually make the decisions. One of the things I deeply believe is that design by committee does not work. So for us, as we were approaching this project, we started by pulling together a small group of leaders within the organization. This was primarily myself as the Director of Customer Experience, Mark Ewing, our head of Public Service, and Deanna Romrell, our head of Community Engagement. We pulled in also some folks from HR and other folks. But ultimately, you know, we tried to keep it to the folks closest to the work.
Together we looked at where the expectations were similar between locations and where they were different. And we also looked at what activities we needed, or wanted staff to be doing more of in the future. From there, we focused on the activities that needed to be done, and we took a guess at what percentage of time needed to be spent on that activity, depending on the role. Percentage is important here because you only have 100%. So this helped us make sure that we weren’t giving anyone more work than they could reasonably be expected to do in their scheduled hours.
We used all of this information to put together a first draft of what some basic expectations could look like. We created this first draft because as a small group, you know, that’s one really great perspective, and we needed to have that first draft because feedback in the design process is a lot more meaningful when there is something to respond to.
In design thinking, this is called prototyping and it can be used for more than just physical things. I’m a big fan of it. We took this very rough first draft and shared it with our managers and then with our staff, and we started by asking everyone for that input. What of this matched up with their understanding of what the current expectations were? Where were things different? What was missing that they were sad to lose? What was missing that they were happy to lose? What of their work wasn’t reflected in that document?
We had a conversation to understand why the differences were happening and what that meant if we needed to shift some of these expectations that we were starting to lay out. Along the way of having a many, many, many series of conversations with staff at all levels of the organization, our small team continuously synthesized what we heard, incorporated that feedback into the ultimate framework, and refined that project.
Then at the end, we brought all of our public service staff together to do one final check and make sure the expectations were reasonable and made sense. This gave managers then, a tool to have individual conversations with their staff—to agree what could be expected of them in the coming year. It was a long process, but the iteration and the staff involvement made the end result so much stronger and more meaningful.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: How do we understand our staff capacity? 12:15
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
Well, I think it’s kind of simple. You look at your budget. It sounds simple, and it kind of is. Your budget tells you how many positions you have. With that, and with the understanding of what you expect of your staff you can really see what your capacity is to cover all of your service points and all the other work you need to do.
You do need to account for a certain amount of capacity drain. People don’t work exactly forty hours per week, fifty-two weeks a year. Not only should you account for vacation time and sick leave, fifteen minute breaks, etc., but also making sure to account for turnover and roles, and the time it takes to fill roles. So yes, there may be some complicated formulas to figure out to get all the details right, but in the end it should be possible to look at how many positions you have budgeted and what you expect of your staff, to see how much capacity you have with your staff to cover a service point or shelve materials. Even more importantly, you can compare what that capacity is with what the public is expecting of your organization.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: You talk about what the public expects from your organization, your staff capacity, and your budget. Will you share how all of this plays into creating a staffing plan? 13:28
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
There is the work that needs to be done. What the community expects of you as an organization, and there is your ability to do that work—your staff’s capacity. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that those two circles don’t perfectly overlap, but rather are a Venn diagram. Now, one of the things I love about librarians is that they are great at making things work. Give them a problem and they’ll come up with solutions. So, our communities don’t really see that those two circles aren’t perfectly together. But that is happening because of the incredible work that library staff is doing to meet the needs of the community.
However, the more those circles drift apart, the more staff are stretched, thinner and thinner, and that isn’t sustainable. By proactively comparing those two circles and seeing how far apart they are and understanding where the discrepancies are, you can really see where you’re falling short, and even also where you might be overstaffed in a particular area. Once you understand the problem, then you can really start to develop a plan to solve for the specific issues that you are facing.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: Once we’ve done everything you’re talking about, how do we create a plan? 14:47
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
Again, you have to involve your staff. Our branch managers and department managers are the ones best positioned to know what the needs of the community is, what our staff needs are, what do we need to do to serve the folks coming into our spaces?
For us, we met with all of our managers individually, showed them the data we had, what was the work that was expected, what was the staff capacity that we had budgeted and started playing around with what staffing could look like? What would bring those two circles more into alignment?
All of our managers knew, at a certain level, that we are understaffed in various areas. But this framework gave us a tool to have a positive, proactive conversation about how we could build a path forward together and to agree to what staffing would need to be added or changed over the next couple of years. And it also gave us a tool to see where our most dire issues were so we could address them first.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: I saw you give an outstanding conference presentation on this topic, and you had a spreadsheet that you used to do all of the calculations for this process. Do you want to talk about that? 15:50
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
When you’re trying to tackle a problem and understand a problem, you need to look at both the qualitative and the quantitative. For us, moving from one to the other and using this spreadsheet to help us map out a future was really, really helpful.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #10: Great. Numbers help pull all this together. We’ve put a link to your spreadsheet in the show notes if anyone wants to refer to it. Is there anything else you’d like to share? 16:20
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
I just need to call out all the great folks that I worked with on this project, because this is absolutely not something I could have done on my own. As I mentioned earlier, Mark Ewing, our head of Public Service, and Deanna Romrell, our head of Community Engagement, were essential partners in digging into the details of this work. Not to mention Shelley Chapman, our HR Director, and Allison Speer, our former Director of Equity and Organizational Development. Unfortunately, she’s no longer with the organization, and also all of our public service managers for their feedback and engagement with this work along the way. And ultimately, all our staff who do such incredible work supporting the Salt Lake City community every day. They are amazing.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #11: And I’ll call out those great folks too. They’re my former colleagues at Salt Lake City Public Library. Hello good people, well done. Do you have any favorite leadership books or resources and why? 17:10
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
I think it’s a bit of a classic, but I do love Good to Great by Jim Collins. It’s research-driven recommendations on how to proactively, positively evolve an organization. I think those insights are so, so great, particularly around the importance of identifying the who before the what. The success of your organization is tied directly to the success of your teams. If you have the wrong teams, either in structure or talent, you aren’t going to be as successful as you could be as an organization. I think this book offers a great roadmap to seriously look at these issues, along with several others that plague organizations trying to become more impactful. I highly recommend it for anyone taking on a leadership role.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #12: Daniel, in closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 18:06
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
I deeply believe libraries play a critical role in the weaving of our social fabric, and we do this by being places that facilitate connection. Yes, getting connected to information, materials and other resources, but also by being places for people to connect with each other and to their community, you know, whether that’s parents connecting with each other while their kids are listening to a story, or a homeless veteran getting connected to the services to find shelter. Public libraries are one of the last remaining truly public institutions that are there for everyone in our communities. And for me, libraries are the embodiment of what it means to be a pluralistic, democratic society, and I’m honored to do my small part to help ensure the Salt Lake City Public Library lives up to that.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #13: Well said, Daniel. You mentioned libraries weaving together our social fabric, which they absolutely do. In this discussion we can think of staffing plans as the warp and the weft on which we weave together those services—best connecting staff resources with community needs. Thank you for being here today to share this with our listeners. 19:01
Daniel Neville-Rehbehn:
Happy to chat. Thanks so much for inviting me.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
My pleasure.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right to your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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