The City of Watertown Water Department/Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) is a government entity created to deal with all matters of wastewater treatment and sewage sludge disposal within the City of Watertown. With just 18 employees (represented by CSEA Local 7151), the WWTP serves over 65,000 people. Planned facility and staff expansions last year came at the same time the WWTP was experiencing an increasing number of retirements. WWTP management decided to address the situation by hiring new employees and promoting existing employees to supervisory positions. These shifts meant a number of new managers would need supervisory training in order to succeed on the job. With WDI’s assistance, the WWTP was able to provide supervisory training to 12 of their employees.
WDI received notice recently that the outcome of the supervisory training was excellent. Communication and project planning skills improved significantly. In addition, employees new to managerial roles gained skills in the basics of management, which led to team building at all levels of the department.
Since the completion of this project, the WWTP has provided their managerial employees with a Level 2 supervisory skills training class that is still ongoing. We look forward to seeing continued improvements from this round two of training.
COVID-19 Update: This project was run pre-COVID. Since COVID, the Waste Water Treatment Facility is operating with skeleton shifts. The facility is keeping a minimum of workers on-site to run operations while rotating others in. There are no layoffs and workers who are home, self-isolating, are on call. Management has been careful to design a schedule so that if worker(s) fall ill to the virus, there are others who can rotate in to keep things running. Overall, the facility is keeping up on all required testing and maintenance, but deferring larger projects that would require that the workforce work together in a larger group.
