Council fellow Matthew Lee testifies on benefits awareness and transit access
Matthew Lee, a legislative fellow for Council Member Narcisse, says early turnover and employees not knowing their benefits drive attrition, and proposes free transit access for all city employees as a tangible benefit.
Awesome.
Hi, my name is Matthew Lee.
I'm a legislative fellow actually for the council member Mercedes Narcisse.
This is also my first time speaking, so if I do break the quorum or any of the rules, I apologize.
I'm taking it slow.
I wanted to talk about the testimony that I heard in this chamber and what I think might be a good direction for how to improve retention amongst municipal workers.
The two biggest things that I've noticed, which we've had previous testimony point out, as well as
It's basically that turnover happens very early, right?
The second thing that we also noticed is that employees
don't know their benefits.
As we talked about extensively, or rather you talked about extensively, with DCAS, right, there's a whole lot of effort in how do we educate current city employees on the benefits that they do have.
And I think that lack of knowledge
combined with jumping into the job early in those one to four years, as DCAS talked about, as well as previous testimony, reveals that that lack of knowledge on what is available to city employees
combined with the heavy work that we all do trying to help the city, makes it really difficult for them to stay invested in the job, right?
And I think rather than simply thinking about it as just how do we get advancements in career and how do we get people to move up, we also...
Think about maybe how do we get them to feel like they have those benefits regardless of whether they know about it, right?
I mean, to the previous speaker and testimony's point regarding housing, that's something that regardless of whether you're making enough money or not,
you feel the pressure of losing your housing more than you do the benefits that you are getting from the city at that point, right?
And I think, you know, there's certainly many...
Have to wrap it up.
Appreciate you.
There are certainly many ways that this council can work on it, but I think even something simple like free transit access for all city employees would be a way in
making sure that if we are moving to change this city for the better, that we can move freely and we can feel that benefit without even having someone tell us, hey, you have this benefit.
Because it's as simple as just not even thinking about tapping the card anymore to get on the train or the bus.
Thank you.