Multnomah County Employment Trends Report: Acknowledgement & Introduction

Acknowledgement

We recognize that we are doing work on occupied land, and are here as guests. In proper introduction to the work, we want to acknowledge the rightful owners of this land as we dive into an analysis around identity, power, and history. Multnomah County lies within the traditional homelands of the Multnomah, Oregon City Tumwater, Watlala, and Clackamas Chinooks and the Tualatin Kalapuya Peoples who were relocated to the Grand Ronde Reservation under the Kalapuya etc., 1855, ratified treaty (also known as the Willamette Valley Treaty, 1855). Today, these Tribes are a part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The Grand Ronde people continue to maintain a connection to their ancestral homelands and maintain their traditional cultural practices.

Introduction

Why Multnomah County Employment Trends?

This report analyzes the demographics of the Multnomah County workforce and recent trends in hiring, separations, promotions, and other employee development opportunities and employee movement. Data are from the County’s workforce system of record, Workday.

The goals of the project are to:

• understand major employment trends at the County, including differences by department, race, age, gender, and other demographics
• support workforce equity efforts
• help the County plan for a workforce that is productive and supportive for all employees
• make the employment data more easily accessible and transparent

This report focuses specifically on workforce patterns over the 2020, 2021, and 2022 fiscal years, which span from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2022. Most analyses are countywide, but department-level results are also shown where possible. Additionally because the majority of County employees are Regular employees (Represented and Non-represented Regular employees), many analyses and trends focus on regular employees.

The last report examining these employment trends was published in 2017 and focused on data from FY 2015 and FY 2016 (FY 2015-FY 2016 HR Trends). Shortly after the report was released, the County switched its system of record — the human resource management software system that keeps track of employees’ demographics and employment movements, among other functions — from SAP to Workday, which changed the way data were tracked and the structure of the data. As a result, it was not possible to combine data between SAP and Workday into a single analysis. 

During that transition, the Evaluation and Research Unit (ERU) and County leadership made the decision to wait until Workday was fully implemented to conduct another employment trends report, which required us to wait until there were enough fiscal years’ worth of data in Workday to conduct statistical analyses. However, before we could begin work on our first report using Workday data, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, pulling our research staff into the County’s pandemic response, diminishing our capacity to conduct these analyses.

By June 2022, the ERU was back in a position to undertake analyses of employment trends. 

Important Context during This Time Period

The time period of FY 2020 through FY 2022 (July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2022) was a time of major global, national, and local historical events, including:  

1. COVID-19: In March 2020, Governor Kate Brown issued an executive order directing everyone in Oregon to stay home unless absolutely necessary to help stop the spread of COVID-19. At the time, non-essential County employees were directed to telework, were re-assigned to support COVID-related work, or placed on paid administrative leave if they could not telework due to the nature of their jobs. Essential employees continued to report to work sites and operated under strict — and rapidly changing — health policies. Employees continued to work in this way until the Future of Work implementation began on Oct. 18, 2021, with employees starting new work arrangements that included a telework pilot and a return to the office for many employees. 
2. Social justice movements: In the summer of 2020, a movement of demonstrations against racism and police violence occurred in downtown Portland. Though the political views on the demonstrations varied, they had a profound effect on our communities and employees. They also created security concerns for many employees who reported to work at the County’s downtown offices due to exposure to tear gas, experiences of verbal harassment, or an inability to access or leave their work space due to unsafe conditions (e.g., fires and broken glass in building lobbies). 
3. Extreme weather events, including life-threatening freezing temperatures, ice storms, wind storms, heat domes, and devastating wildfires, during almost every winter and summer during this time period.

Results from the 2021 Countywide Employee Survey showed that these historical events played major roles in employees’ experiences, both at work and in their personal lives. Many employees reported increases in stress, decreases in feeling supported and valued, and challenges with safety and security during this time. Some employees highlighted the continued political tensions these events created between co-workers, and even within themselves as both County employees and members of the public.

Major developments within Multnomah County also affected employees’ experiences at work during this period. The ever-shifting needs of our community and the strategies by which the County could meet them necessitated frequent policy discussions and shifts. The organization saw several major executive and departmental leadership changes. The Future of Work initiative, which formalized the County’s telework pilot program and kicked off the return to in-person work for many employees went into effect on Oct. 18, 2021 — the same day that the County’s vaccine requirement for employees went into effect. Meanwhile, many staff were actively involved in the ongoing work around the Workforce Equity Strategic Plan (WESP).

Additionally, numerous departments and work groups experienced particularly significant developments and changes that impacted their employees’ perceptions and feelings of working at the County. Examples of the many context-setting circumstances, challenges and opportunities across our departments, divisions, and work groups included, but certainly were not limited to:

• The Health Department continuing to respond to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic
• The Library undergoing structural changes
• The Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS) formally becoming its own department
• Employees in public safety departments, including the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, Department of Community Justice, and the District Attorney’s Office, signaling that they were experiencing lower levels of belonging and feeling disconnected and siloed from the rest of the County
• The Elections Division within the Department of Community Services conducted seven elections between July 2019 and June 2022, including one general election and two primary elections. 

When interpreting the results and analyses shared in this report, we encourage you to keep in mind that the data are grounded in a specific time and in these, among other, additional contexts.

In many ways, changes in the County workforce reflect wider demographic trends. It is important to remember that demographic trends are themselves products of systemic oppression throughout the state and country. Oregon's history of discrimination constrained the professional opportunities of generations of people of color and others with non-dominant identities, influencing both historical hiring patterns and workplace cultures, including those within Multnomah County. And the impacts of this oppression are relevant today. 

Though both the county population and the organization’s workforce remain largely White, the population of Multnomah County is rapidly growing and diversifying. The County workforce must be prepared to serve its changing community while addressing inequities that were both inherited and perpetuated, adhering to the vision of diversity, equity, and inclusion for all employees.

Data Categories and Limitations of Data Analysis

This report primarily focuses on race and ethnicity and age demographics, as well as gender demographics based on data gathered through a less-inclusive field that offered binary options. We also accounted for additional gender demographics that were gathered through a more-inclusive gender identity field. We also examined other demographics, including veteran status, disability, and sexual orientation. However, many employees have not entered this information about more inclusive gender identity, veteran status, disability, and sexual orientation into Workday, making analyses and inferences from these demographics difficult because there is a large percentage of unknown data. 

Further, this report is not a qualitative review of how people interact with the organization and does not capture the actual lived experience of employees. Critically, a failure to identify a significant trend does not necessarily mean that underlying patterns, including possible disparities in treatment or experience, do not exist. The group findings we are analyzing may obscure individual-level findings, and our analyses of employment data is not meant to contradict or counteract employee testimony in any way. Our analyses also cannot explain the "why" behind the data — more research, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, is needed to fully understand many results.

The analyses in this report often describe and compare rates of employment actions. Rates are defined as the number of employees that had a specific employment action (e.g., separation, hire, promotion) out of the total number of employees in that group. For example, if there are 10 regular employees in a department, and 2 employees received a promotion, the promotion rate for that department would be 20% (2 out of 10). 

Rates are typically calculated over a single fiscal year. However, when some employment actions occur infrequently, rates may be calculated over the entire reporting period (FY 2020 through FY 2022) to allow for a meaningful group size to conduct analyses. Any employee that was active at any point during a fiscal year is included in the overall rate. 

Many of the major results in this report are about Regular employees, who are defined as employees in an on-going, budgeted position. Regular employees may be represented by a Bargaining Labor Union (e.g., AFSCME Local 88, Oregon Nurses Association, Corrections Deputy Association), or Non-represented. Regular employees (including both Regular Represented and Regular Non-represented) make up about 80% of the County workforce. Results for other employee types are also included towards the end of the report.

What does statistical significance mean?

In this report, we primarily highlight results that are statistically significant. A statistically significant result does not mean that the result is interesting, important, or big. 

A "significant" result means that statistical tests indicate that there is likely a true proportional difference between groups or difference across time that is probably not due to chance or coincidence. In this report, we use a 95% confidence level, meaning that we can be 95% sure that the difference is real and not a coincidence.

Statistics are impacted by several factors, including the amount of variability in the data and the number of people in each group. 

It is also important to note that sometimes statistically significant results show up or don’t show up in unexpected ways. For example, sometimes:

• In a graph, it may appear that there are differences between groups that do not show up as statistically significant.
• In a graph, it may appear that there are not big differences between groups that do show up as statistically significant.
• Two groups can have the exact same averages or percentages, but one group may show up as statistically significant than the benchmark, while the other group does not.

Each of these instances is the result of the variability and sample sizes of the data. For the group that shows a statistically significant difference, we can be 95% confident that the differences between the groups are not due to chance. That does not mean that there are no differences between the other groups — it just means that we are not able to rule out chance or coincidence.

Go to the next section: Overall Countywide Trends

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