The City of Westerville, Ohio is home to 43,000 residents, as well as the North American corporate headquarters for DHL. Westerville's finance team is responsible for administering over $139 million in expenses annually and ensuring appropriate compensation for their public sector employees. With 12 departments and over 400 full-time employees, compensation benchmarking is difficult because job titles have different definitions. To keep up with industry trends, the team was surveying the market themselves which was time-consuming and frustrating. This also made reporting and insight difficult because data from different surveys and multiple sources were in various formats and not in one place.
Challenge
Previously, the City of Westerville sought a consultant to do a traditional compensation study every few years, which was an expensive static report. The reports were difficult to decipher and did not provide real-time data or updates. In order to keep up with the changing industry standards, the city needed a more accurate and cost-effective way to benchmark compensation.
"We wanted to be able to benchmark our compensation, and we also just wanted to be able to have that information in one place, so we could do our internal parity analysis and have the details that we need to do that."
- Adam Maxwell, Director of Administrative Services, City of Westerville
Solution
The City of Westerville decided to partner with GovInvest, an online platform that centrally stores and analyzes public sector job data. GovInvest's Compensation Benchmarking and Labor Costing Software Modules provide real-time analysis, informed decision-making, and increased transparency. The modules make it easy and visual to benchmark compensation against relevant public sector agencies of similar size, and the software provides all the data in one place.
"While we've done our own salary research in the past, with GovInvest, we were able to compare total compensation packages for the first time. The report was easy to read, it was easy to interpret and it was what we needed. It was great for us."
- Lynn Miller, Human Resources Manager, City of Westerville
GovInvest provided the City of Westerville with a custom benchmarking report for the city's salary ranges. This report compared compensation across public sector jobs and helped the city decide where to increase salaries to stay competitive in the marketplace.
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