Staff Training and The Big Black Hole

[Eamonn]

I am not sure about what is happening in other Councils but I am not very impressed with the staff that work in our Service Center.

I am supposing that all the kinks have now been worked out and that Scoutnet is up, running and being a good boy??

Her Who Must Be Obeyed,likes to work and works part time at our local hospital. Thanks to what the Union did in the past she does earn very good money and from what she tells me along with what others have said she is good at what she does. A couple of years back there was an opening in the Council Service Center for a part time Registrar. She thought that might be a good fit for her life style and while she knew that there might be less money she was very surprised when she found out it paid just barely above minimum wage.

I have always been of the mind that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

At work I share a PA. with two other people, one being the Director of Nursing, the other being the Director of the facility. The amount of work that this Lady (Dolly) manages to get done is outstanding. Everything from Billing and payroll to meds and diets. I have never looked up what her pay scale is (None of my business.) But I think that she is well paid and she has the same benefit plan that I have. She is there and gets the job done at times even going above and beyond and giving me a kick in the pants as needed.

I look at our Service Center staffing and I see: A lady who answers the phone. She is a real pain. When you ask her anything she gives everyone the number of the DE!! We now have a full time Registrar. A very nice Lass, but she really is a sandwich short of a picnic. I asked for a report showing all the Wood Badge Trained people in the Council by District. She gave me a full report of the trained leaders by unit. (Which wasn't up to date - Maybe not her fault.) When I asked her why it was by unit she informed me that is the only way she knows how to do it.

Last Fall she drove me nuts with unregistered youth. One Cub Scout sent in seven applications. I personally handed her two of them. But they weren't there. Lost in the big black hole? The parents were very upset!! Try asking them for a donation to the FOS!!

We have an office manager. When I ask for a flyer's to be made we have to have a work order and it can take up 3 weeks, even then it is never on time. Again she is a nice Lady.

We have a fund raising person. I'm not sure what she does? I asked for a report of the Districts FOS campaign to be E-mailed to me 3 weeks ago and still don't have it.

We have a Finance Secretary, she pays the bills and is supposed to keep track of things. The budgets from annual events that have been held can change from week to week and items are charged to the wrong budget.

We also have a Lady who looks after the Scout Shop.

Many of these people have never had any training except from each other. All have said out loud that they think that they are under paid.

We are a small Council 10,600 youth. Half of this number is in LFL, which is under the watchful eye of the Field Director. Cub Scouts advance once a year and don't create a lot of paperwork. There is a lot of Merit Badges earned by the 1,500 or less Boy Scouts that attend Summer Camp and there is extra work at Rechartering time and at Sign up. However during this time there isn't that much fund raising going on, but we are discussing hiring temps to help during this "Rush period."

I think that we are way overstaffed and could let half of this lot go. Retrain the rest and pay them better. We would save money on benefits and see improved performance.

Eamonn

[Proud Eagle]

It is often true that you can save money and get more out of employees by having better trained, better educated, more capable, and better compensated employees. Or at leas that is what I have read in some papers about business and economics. After all, if the professors wrote that it is so, it must be so. In this case I think it may actually be so.

 

Incidentally this is one of the reasons why increasing the minimum wage actually hurts low skill level workers. It becomes more likely to be economical to replace several minimum output minimum wage workers with a smaller number of high output higher paid workers. Or in other fields it becomes more economical to replace minimum wage workers with computers, robots, machines, or other productivity enhancing equipment. Now the potential flip side is this may lead to a more effecient economy, and perhaps cause some low skill workers to seek ways to improve their skill levels, and create a greater number of higher than minimum wage jobs. Oh, I almost forgot, buying more productivity enhancing equipment may increase the demand for workers in businesses related to the creation of such equipment, and therefore offset some of the job losses, or then again it may not, since that really depends on some other conditions that we don't really know.

 

Isn't that just the trouble with economics? In science you have to hold all variables equal to test the outcome of changing one variable. Yet the dynamic nature of economics means that changing almost any one variable will create a change in other variables. That is unless you create some sort of artificial controls, but those usually lead to long term instability and are not normally sustainable.

 

Messing with the free market seems more and more to be like playing God the more I learn about economics.

 

My apologies for turning this into Economics 101. I just can't seem to help myself these days.(This message has been edited by Proud Eagle)

[Twocubdad]

Eamonn! You've moved south! I'm really looking forward to meeting you have having you in our council. You've described our office staff to at "T." Our front office is generally run by five women who seem to be doing the work of two. I once told one of the women that I could submit a tour permit listing hell as the destination and they would approve it. Insead of denying it, becoming offended or arguing about, the woman shrugged and said, "Yeah, I probably don't read these things as closely as I should." Knowing they must be working for peanuts (eeeh, eeeh, eeeh) the thing that surprises me is the relative low turnover rate. I suppose regardless of pay, a clean, nine-to-five job with no heavy lifting beats WalMart regardless of the pay.

 

The group you failed to mention is the middle management guys who allow this to go on. We have an assistant Scout Executive who raises "clueless" to a new standard. Of course he and our SE are a matched set. Neither are exactly the sharpest pencils in the box. Our Program Director is a young guy they seem to be bringing up in the same mould. He never seems to have much to do with Scouting though. Maybe I'm just making a wrong assumption about what "programs" he's in charge of. We do have a good guy as Field Director. To my understanding he runs things at the council level. At least the little contact I've had with membership and programs at the council level, he was involved.

 

I will say our saving grace is that we have a good field staff. Our District Director is top-notch. Knows when to help, knows when to get the heck out of the way. Our DE is brand new to the district, but seems like a good one, based on the couple contacts I've had. Based on first impressions, he's earned the benefit of the doubt for now.

[PNScouter]

I assume you guys have let the proper people in your district and council know of your concerns. You should be lobying these people for productive change.

[Twocubdad]

Frequently and loudly.

[eisely]

I too have wondered if councils would be better off with fewer, more capable, and better paid people. It is a harsh think to say, but there seems to be a pattern here.