Town officials say three non-management employees have “left the corporation” as a result of a “strategic realignment” of Erin’s workforce.
The identity of the employees, as well as their positions and departments, was not released.
“I can tell you they were service delivery providers, they weren’t members of senior staff,” said CAO Nathan Hyde.
“The 40 per cent of change affects all seven departments within the corporation, so it was comprehensive.”
In a July 13 press release, Hyde explained the realignment involves a restructuring of existing roles.
“I came up with a plan and we looked at all of the positions,” Hyde said in an interview with the Advertiser.
“We’ve actually streamlined some of it, which involved changing some job descriptions, changing job titles and trying to make sure that we have the right people in place or the right suite of duties into those positions to deliver services effectively.
“It did also mean three exits from the corporation, where we were able to find efficiencies and eliminate some duplications of services, so we’ve done that as well.”
The job losses were not in the original press release from the town.
“I don’t necessarily want this to be couched as terminations for the Town of Erin or anything like that, because it’s really not what this is about,” he said.
“This is about how do we take the whole corporation, look at where we can deliver the best services, efficiently and effectively and how do we streamline what we’re doing to deliver those services in a manner that we don’t have to up our budget and respect taxpayer dollars at the same time.”
Hyde explained the realignment meant looking at how to better serve the community.
“A lot of what this involves is looking at those frontline positions and finding out where are we bloated, where are we duplicating services, how can we best streamline some of the ways we are delivering services to the residents on all levels, because we want to be a customer service focused organization,” he said.
“We want to provide those services and demonstrate value for money for taxpayers.”
Hyde explained job descriptions have changed in order to clearly define staff members’ roles.
“We used to have seven layers of staff and we’ve now gone down to four layers of staff,” he said. “It’s all about collaboration and working together and getting all of the departments to work well together and be integrated so we can move the community forward.”
Mayor Allan Alls said council approved the restructuring.
“The council’s bought it all, we agree with what he is doing,” he said. “It will make the office and the town more efficient and obviously we hope that it will work better.”
The realignment has created five new positions the town is hoping to fill.
Postings for a deputy clerk, communications and special projects officer, human resource and administration assistant, internal audit and risk management analyst and payroll and finance administrator appeared on the Erin website last week.
Hyde declined to be interviewed about the five positions but clarified by email the town has vacant positions it needs to fill.
“We have also identified areas in departments where there was an opportunity to improve some of our operations and to address our mandated legislated requirements,” said Hyde in the email.
“We are not increasing the number of permanent full-time staff employed by the town.”
