Nearly three dozen Washoe County employees are having their salaries adjusted after numerous complaints arose in the wake of a consultant study that revamped county salaries. The change was first announced at a Washoe County Board of Commissioners meeting in late February. Commissioner Alexis Hill made the announcement. She thanked Commissioner Mariluz Garcia for helping with the salary adjustments after employees appealed some of the changes and publicly criticized the process.
“We heard about this during public comment,” Hill said, speaking about some new employees “leapfrogging” over more senior employees and making more money. “We definitely wanted to clear this up and make sure Korn Ferry was implemented in a very fair way, and I hope employees feel they are heard.”
Employees said they only went public with their concerns—by speaking out during public comment at county meetings—about the salary study because they were not being heard internally. This Is Reno obtained public records showing dozens of employees had either concerns or questions about the study.
Commissioner Mike Clark said some staff getting raises before others was part of the problem. He was referring to the county manager’s office, whose employees first got the raises after they were approved in December 2022. He also noted that the nearly three dozen getting salary adjustments after appealing was a drop in the bucket.
“Thirty-four people is approximately 1% of the county workforce,” he said. “As far as I am concerned, we have about another 99% of our rank-and-file folks, many of those folks are unhappy with the situation. I think everybody would agree things should have been done a little differently.”
Salary adjustments made in 2023, following the salary study, created a situation where some newly hired employees were making more than their supervisors. Implementation of the salary changes last year had employees, some in tears, testifying at public meetings that the way the new pay scale was implemented created problems.
Concerns about the Korn Ferry study arose from within multiple county departments, according to public records obtained by This Is Reno. Numerous employees from the sheriff’s office, district attorney’s office, library system, public defenders’ office and the main county government expressed concerns and frustration with Korn Ferry.
“Myself along with many other [Washoe County] employees…are frustrated with the poor rollout of this process,” a Northern Nevada Public Health employee wrote in an email complaining about the study.
Other public health employees publicly blasted the study in December. Mia Gzebb, a health department employee, said at the December board of health meeting that the salary adjustments created inequality, despite concerns expressed before the wages were changed.
“New employees were given a 5.3% increase to meet the bottom of the range,” she said. “And employees over one year of experience, who had completed training and probation, were given a 0.3% increase of $0.11. Our 5% merit above the base wage that we earned on our one-year anniversary was effectively erased.”
Gzebb was not alone.
“All employees should be compensated on a level ‘playing field’ for those said years of service, not allowing some employees to remain ‘maxed out’ and denying others that have [met] the same criteria of being a maxed out employee,” an employee with the DA’s office wrote. “Either all employees should be treated equally and remain maxed out in their classification, or all employees should have to wait until their respective merit reviews to be bumped to the top of the new pay range.”
An employee in the medical examiner’s office had a similar concern.
“We understand that Korn Ferry was not designed to immediately increase employee pay, but we feel the changes in the particular job classification led [to] unexpected consequences for our more senior employees, whose pay no longer reflects their experience,” the employee wrote.
Employees also said the study’s implementation led to low morale.
“For any employees who have followed this study closely, it has been a real morale issue,” another employee wrote. “It has been hard to focus on the positives in the County when we know there is a huge disparity between the upper management, the County Manager and his office and the rest of the employees.
“It also doesn’t help that much of the Korn Ferry study was kept secret for only HR and the County Manager’s office,” they added.
Washoe County’s spokesperson, after county employees ramped up criticism of the process, defended the study.
“Washoe County had not conducted a salary study in over 20 years and was therefore not competitive with other public organizations and was losing talented, skilled and valuable employees to those other organizations,” county spokesperson Bethany Drysdale said late last year. “In the end, all of the new salary ranges increased for the more than 2,000 employees covered by the study, and no employees’ pay was decreased.”
