Ranging from parks and recreation to police departments, members of the general public are in frequent contact with state and local governments. As such, these public sector institutions carry tremendous influence and responsibility, making it critically important that they work efficiently and effectively.
The public sector’s speed and efficiency can be hindered by manual redundancies such as outdated spreadsheets and methods of reporting and tracking incidents. It can also be hindered by a lack of transparency between their various departments resulting in the inability to make adequate policy improvements.
Within the public sector, they experience high accident rates making risk management a top priority to ensure compliance requirements are being met. Sodales’ application for Enterprise Health, Safety and Employee Relations provides a revolutionary solution for state and local governments that allows them to proactively identify risk factors, manage human rights compliance and make adequate policy improvements. Keep reading to learn about some of the key features and modules of our product that are especially transformative for this highly regulated industry.
Collective Bargaining Agreement Management
The public sector is widely known as a highly unionized industry. According to a labor force survey conducted by Statistics Canada, 74.1% of public sector employees in Canada were union members in 2021. With unionized employees, comes complicated and elaborate collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). These CBAs, which can be as sizeable as 10,000 pieces of paper per agreement, can cause headaches for employers if not effectively managed.
Sodales’ collective bargaining agreement management module provides a fully integrated and real-time CBA/policy rulebook, complete with a searchable engine. Our software allows employers to maintain timelines and track grievances with the ability to understand seniority rules and manage union job bidding. Sodales’ CBA management module also delivers the ability to complete complex calculations for seniority that can accommodate for different components of CBAs, including hire date and hours worked with union-based exceptions.
Some other benefits of our solution for CBA management includes its ability to integrate with our job bidding module. This means that employers can manage the recruitment process using real-time seniority criteria defined in the CBA including department, location, tenure and more. Sodales for Enterprise Health, Safety and Employee Relations gives employers a strategic advantage by helping them make consistent and informed decisions with complete version history of CBAs. These features can aid employers in state and local government with tracking compliance to effectively manage their overall risk exposure.
Integrated Incident & Disability Claims Management
Accident and incidents are unfortunately common in the public sector, but the good news is that proactive safety measures can help to prevent and reduce these incidents. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2011, state and local government employees reported a nonfatal accident and illness rate of 5.7 cases per 100 full-time workers, considerably higher than the private sector rate of 3.3 cases per 100 full-time workers. Many of these accidents are happening to local government employees, with about 4 out of 5 accidents and illnesses recorded in the public sector occurring among local government workers.
Sodales’ incident and disability management module can help state and local governments create a proactive safety environment to reduce risk exposure. Our software seamlessly allows employees across multiple departments to report incidents and near-misses immediately. Automated notifications push incident details across the chain of command and provide them with actionable insights to analyze root-causes, allowing organizations to implement effective corrective actions.
Sodales also offers a solution for occupational and non-occupational disability claims with Return to Work and Modified Duties plans that accommodates various rules set for different departments such as police, fire, parks, libraries, corporate and more. The differences between occupational and non-occupational claims are relevant to ensure you can best assist employees with disabilities at work or assist them during a gradual return to work. The features of Sodales’ integrated incident and disability management module can empower your employees to feel safe, respected and heard in the workplace which contributes to enriched human rights and employee safety, which ultimately improves employee retention in the long-term.
Grievances, Disciplines and Case Management
An overwhelming amount of required documentation and a lack of adequate reporting and collaboration across departments can cause bottlenecks within institutions in state and local government. This results in the inability to resolve issues quickly and effectively.
Sodales’ module for grievances, disciplines and case management provides a centralized platform that eliminates silos and expediates human capital management processes through the use of automated process flows. This helps to eliminate barriers between departments, and aids employers with crucial information throughout all stages of the grievance and disciplines processes. Employers can intelligently determine next steps and feel confident in their decision making with the ability to use past precedence to make informed decisions. Sodales also accommodates non-linear processes with the flexibility to add additional arbitration steps based on the department’s policies and rulebooks.
While many other case management applications may give institutions the ability to track and report, Sodales provides pre-built industry content specifically tailored for state and local government organizations, including, but not limited to, Discrimination and Racism, Dismissal and Termination, Harassment and Psychological harassment, Health and Safety, and Hours of Work/Overtime/Schedule/On Call. All of these features provide public sector institutions with a powerful and efficient solution to prioritize the rights of their employees through increased operational transparency and a strong standard for safety. Using Sodales, employers can save time and money, achieve regulatory compliance, and improve overall employee safety and satisfaction.
There are many challenges facing state and local governments including a tightening labor market, environmental crises, and rapid technological evolution. In the face of these challenges, the public sector must transform internally to effectively execute tasks. Sodales offers an innovative solution that helps highly regulated and unionized institutions within state and local government to streamline their organizational compliance and employee relations processes. This can allow institutions to improve their use of time, ability to manage risk exposure and improve their regulatory compliance. To learn more about the features and modules outlined throughout this blog, book a personalized demonstration today here.
