Need advice from other city council members

[Marian Clennon]

I am looking for what other cities are doing for evaluations of department heads. We have a city administrator. The council is trying to set up evaluations for department heads and no one seems to know how it should be done. I feel that the council should be involved. How do your towns handle evaluations?

Thanks for any advice or ideas that I can get.
Marian

[Meg Froelich]

We moved in this direction when I was on Greenwood Village City Council, it is very important that a standarized evaluation system be developed. The Council should only evaluate the City Administrator, I think we had the Mayor do the evaluation and then report to Council and she also relayed our comments on the evaluation back to the City Manager. The City Manager evaluated all department heads using the same rubric and then reported back to Council. Since it dealt with personnel matters, it was of course a closed session.
There are examples of forms online if you Google employee evaluation forms, we worked off of an IBM one because a Councilperson had some experience with it -- then modified it to fit our town.
Best of luck!

[Laurie Olmon]

Hi Marian,

Our council just went thru this but since it was our first time as a city it was a little rocky. Of course employee evaluation sessions are closed, which for some reason our council couldn't get. Anyway.....we had a two way evaluation. The City Clerk evaluated the Admin Asst, The Maintenance Sup evaluated the maintenance staff. All the employees evaluated themselves as to what they felt were their strengths and weaknesses, and then set goals for education or steps to improve said weaknesses.

There is one step missing still......an evaluation from employees on the council as to how procedures/processes could be better improved or cost saving etc.

We also contacted surrounding cities as to what their procedure was for employee evaluation, we also contacted local business and temp firms to utilize their paperwork. I even brought in my husband's National Guard Evaluation Reports as an example.

[Marian Clennon]

Thank you Meg and Laurie. Both of your ideas are on the line of what I was thinking. Our City Administrator wants to meet with each of us council members to get our feedback on each department head and then meet with each department head. There are two of us on the council who would like to be a part of the Human Resources committee to be involved in the evaluation process instead of having the entire council meet face to face with the department head. Right now it is usually the Human Resources Director and City Administrator who usually handle most personnel issues. Asking for these evaluations started last summer from the last council. It is a year later and no evaluations, no definite procedure, and the city administrator has given us three different forms to use. As far as we can determine, evaluations have never been done here. We are really running into a lot of resistance from the staff.

Thank you again and I hope that I can hear from someone who has experience with the connection with the city council and the staff.