Chair Hudson questions DHS on staff retention and vacancies

Thank you.

And, okay, I know you just mentioned this.

Deputy Commissioner, but what is DHS doing to fill vacancies and help staff stay in their roles?

You don't have to go into the fill vacancies because I know you're working on filling the vacancies, but what are you doing to help keep people in the room?

So, yes, we have a whole retention process that we're working on with our officers.

One of those processes is really looking at succession planning and trying to see how officers would like to make their...

Complete their career with DHS and what career advancement looks like.

Some of this is a little bit maybe arbitrary, but one of the things that we do do is make sure that we're celebrating our officers, that we're making sure that we're recognizing everybody's birthday.

One of the other things that we are doing is we have instituted a men's conference, a women's conference, where we're working with the officers to kind of understand and hear ideas around how we can work to make things better for them.

That sounds good.

I think I'm echoing the commissioner's sentiments to say that I don't think any of those things are arbitrary.

I think those are very intentional ways to maintain or increase retention.

I would just suggest other sort of affinity groups.

Yes, beyond such gendered roles.

But go ahead.

So, yes, absolutely.

And we're saying men's conference, women's conference as a whole, but we're always looking to just kind of make sure that we're looking to kind of recognize our officers and the hard work that they do on a daily basis.

One of the other things that we are doing is we do make sure that when people do leave interview and try to understand what that is and

being meaningful and planning full around trying to change the narrative.

One of the other things that has happened in the past is officers tend to be able to not, I'm sorry, let me correct that.

One of the things that has happened in the past is officers wasn't allowed to transfer

immediately after coming into our academy.

And we have been really meaningful around making sure that we place officers in their above-road residence, which has increased...

Meaning they couldn't transfer sites.

They couldn't transfer sites that they're just in, they're new, they're going to get whatever schedule that comes to them.

Like a seniority thing?

Absolutely.

So we still practice seniority.

We absolutely have to.

But what we do do is as officers coming out of the academy, we recognize that anybody that scored as a highest, that we place them at the site that they want to be in.

And then in rank order, we start placing them in the above-road preference.

Okay, that's great.

And then...