5.4. ERMUSR 02-11-2014 Ah
Elk River .
Municipal Utilities UTILITIES COMMISSION MEETING
TO: FROM:
Elk River Municipal Utilities Commission Troy Adams, P.E. —General Manager
John Dietz—Chair
Al Nadeau—Vice Chair
Daryl Thompson—Trustee
MEETING DATE: AGENDA ITEM NUMBER:
February 11, 2014 5.4
SUBJECT:
Office Hours
DISCUSSION:
With an increased focus on intercompany communication over the past 5 years, management has
implemented a number of new communication options. For the field staff,"tailgate sessions"were
common place but there had been a lack of cross department coordination. As a response to this,the
Electric and Technical Services departments hold brief daily morning meeting to coordinate activities and
generate awareness of all work being performed to promote efficiency and safety. Recently the Water
department has joined these meeting. This allows for the coordination of shared equipment and other
resources. These meeting were an easy change to implement and have instantly provided value.
Based on the success of these meetings for the field staff, the Office had implemented weekly morning
meetings about 4 years ago. These meetings have been harder to facilitate because they needed to
conduct them during normal business hours. So during these meetings, Office staff would still need to
respond to customer needs at the front counter. This has made it more difficult to consistently provide the
same communication to all Office employees as some may need to leave the meeting to attend to
customer needs.
In March 2014,the Office staff will begin work on the general ledger and billing software conversion.
This process will take over one year to complete. During this time there will be the need to coordinate
group trainings. Some of these trainings may be more efficiently presented to the Office staff all at once.
Management has discussed some options for providing these trainings and improving the effectiveness of
the Office weekly morning meetings. One option would be to hire temporary staff to cover front counter
customer needs during trainings and meeting. A third option would be to conduct these meeting during
non-business hours and pay overtime. Another option that that would provide a solution to both would be
changing the Friday public hours start time.
For management, changing the Friday public hours would be the leading option because in solves both
issues in one solution and would be sustainable long term. Because of the impact that changing the public
hours might have to customer accessibility, Management would like to have a discussion regarding all of
these options with the Commission and get direction.
PAPERER RI
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