• HR is not on your side:
o This is an important point to remember. HR is there to protect Ada County FROM their employees, not to protect Ada County Employees.
• Salary:
o Starting pay is decent, but you will not receive cost of living increases most years so as you gain responsibility and get better at your job you will be doing more work for less pay.
o Another example of salary being an issue is one year supervisors received a 4% increase and everyone else only received a 3% increase because there wasn’t enough money to give everyone a 4% increase. They could have given everyone the same percentage increase, but that would have lessened the amount supervisors received.
• Unsafe working conditions:
o Probation teaches their PO’s self-defense techniques that are entirely inadequate for real world self-defense and give employees a false sense of security. They have been advised and shown that these techniques do not work for years, but the egos of those in charge of the Appropriate Use of Force curriculum prevented any changes. One day someone will get hurt and sue, which is what it will take for them to care because the safety of their employees is not enough.
• Micromanaging:
o Supervisors claim they don’t micromanage even though it’s a constant complaint from their employees. One example would be that you work a “flex” schedule of 40 hours per week instead of getting paid for overtime, if you work 9 hours one day, you’ll work 7 hours the next day to make up for it. Supervisors could better spend their time being effective leaders focusing on process improvement or employee morale, but instead they micromanage when you can flex that hour out so if you want to use this flex schedule to your benefit you’re not allowed to. Supervisors require you to take a longer lunch or come in late regardless of how well that works for your schedule. If you have to leave an hour early on Tuesday for a doctor’s appointment you’re not allowed to work an hour later on Monday to make up for it. And this is all independent of whether or not you have any deadlines that must be met, because of course you can’t leave early if you have court or if there’s something that needs to be done, but if you just have paperwork or even if you’re finished with everything it doesn’t make a difference to them.
o Another example is in supervisors correcting paperwork. I had the word “about” changed to “approximately” and these kinds of changes are extremely common. You can look at everyone’s PO Reports and see that the supervisors making these small changes have submitted reports with glaring errors, so don’t let them bully you.
• Management is not responsive to employee concerns:
o As mentioned, supervisors claim they don’t micromanage despite constantly being told by employees that they do.
o When I had the idea to improve things like the questionnaire for the Social History, they ignored it, even though other PO’s found it useful and improved.
o After explaining and demonstrating that AUF is unsafe, management did not care and claimed they could not make changes to the curriculum, despite the fact they have and do make changes to what is taught to go above and beyond what POST requires.
o Management leaves you feeling like unless your ideas are to support theirs, you will be ignored.
• No legitimate recognition:
o Employees are recognized for small things like covering court hearings or staying until 5:00 on Friday, but many of your contributions will be ignored. As an example, there was a question on how to interpret scoring criteria in PO Reports and my answer to the question differed from the instructor’s answer. I was told by the instructor that they had passed the instructor training and maybe if I took the training too my opinion would count, then they reported me to my supervisor. Nothing ever came of it because I hadn’t done anything wrong, but 6 months later when going over scoring criteria they were teaching it the way I had recommended without any recognition or even an apology for how rudely and condescendingly they had treated me.
