January 27, 2005

San Jose’s employee services assists a workforce of 6,700 employees

City expands worker benefits to include same-sex partners

Editor’s Note: The following is the 20th article in an ongoing series about the city’s departments and appointed officials. Next: San Jose’s Director of Employee Relations Alex Gurza.

By Sheila Sanchez
Staff Writer

San Jose’s Director of Employee Services Mark Danaj has discovered that most government workers are smart committed public servants who purposely dedicate their lives to serving the community.

San Jose’s Employee Services Director Mark A. Danaj is responsible for attracting, developing and retaining a quality workforce for the city. His department assists the city’s 6,700 employees. Photo by Sheila Sanchez

“They represent what we end up experiencing when we take our kids to the library or to the community center,” says the 36-year-old Danaj during a recent interview from his second floor office at City Hall.

Thanks to his two young sons, the San Jose resident has begun comparing his department to Playhouse Disney’s cartoon show “Higley Town Heroes,” which teaches civic lessons to toddlers about people living in a community who help children and become heroes.

“It’s the librarian, the fireman, the policeman, or the garbage man who are the Higley Town heroes,” he says.
Danaj’s mission is to attract, develop and retain a quality workforce for the city.

A typical work day for Danaj is an atypical work day sometimes necessitating the young and ambitious director to focus his attention on e-mail and voice mail messages to a group of city employees who have particular needs to hammering out issues associated with a large workers’ compensation claim with the San Jose City Council in closed session.

The Chicago transplant moved to Silicon Valley two years ago after the city hired him in February of 2003 to replace San Jose Deputy City Manager Kay Winer who had served as the department’s acting director when Nona Tobin, the director of many years, retired.

As soon as he was employed he began evaluating the city’s expansion of its health benefits to include same sex partners. Last year, with the support of District 6 San Jose City Councilman Ken Yeager, who is openly gay, the council passed a resolution recognizing same-sex marriages, becoming the first city in the state to recognize the controversial unions.

Danaj said the city took such bold steps to expand city worker benefits after a female employee wanted to extend medical coverage to two children she was raising with her same-sex partner of 21 years and whom she married in San Francisco in March of 2004. Of the city’s 6,700 employees, about 250 are receiving the domestic partnership benefits. The council’s action infuriated many conservative religious groups.

Danaj discovered human resource management or, as the city calls it, employee services, while serving as an assistant county manager for Lake County, Ill., and was asked to lead the county’s human resources department after the director quit.

He was surprised by how much he enjoyed the field, putting his hat on the ring for the job, going through the competitive search process and being appointed director of human resources and risk management for Lake County, Ill., in 1997.

Department’s purpose
The department is a primary partner in San Jose’s strategic support city service area, responsible for enhancing and enabling city services for San Jose residents. Danaj is the team leader.

Together with finance, general services, information technology, public works, redevelopment and retirement, employee services develops and enables strategies that facility the San Jose City Council’s vision.

The department is responsible for employee recruitment and developing a high performance workforce committed to exceeding customer expectations by developing supervisors and managers and promoting a safe and healthy work environment.

Recruitment and hiring-related activities have declined significantly during the past three years. In 2003, 73 employees were given pink slips, but the department placed all of them in other city jobs, a process that took six months and included a team of nine staff members.

San Jose’s Employee Services Director Mark A. Danaj chats with John Dam, San Jose’s deputy director of human resources. Photo by Sheila Sanchez

In 2004-05, the number of employees that could be laid off or reassigned to different positions is expected to increase. The department is preparing to use seniority lists and bumping procedures to meet the needs. The city’s workforce has been reduced by 30 percent during the last three years.

Despite the workforce reductions, Danaj is proud of 2003 city community survey results which indicate 78 percent of the public is very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their experience with city departments and employees; 73 percent were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the overall quality of services and 64 percent of the public rated the condition of public facilities as very good to excellent.

The city’s 2002 employee survey also reveals that 87 percent of city employees, who responded, agreed or strongly agreed that the city is a good employer. Another employee survey was conducted last fall, but results have not been released yet.

Challenges and rewards
Coming from a strong county government with growing revenues and strong budgets, Danaj has learned valuable lessons trying to meet city budget challenges and city service demands with limited resources. He landed in San Jose during the economic downturn.

Unlike the private sector where cuts are made according to market productivity, the public has to downsize when the city experiencing budget problems and consumers still wanting city services, he explains.

The most rewarding part of Danaj’s job has been working with department employees who despite the inordinate amount of budget reductions have stepped up and cared about their roles and responsibility to city services not allowing their morale to be affected. “I’m proud to be a partner with them,” Danaj’s says. “I admire their energy and commitment to this organization and the community. They take their jobs very seriously. There aren’t many people here who are just sort of biding their time.”

Department’s structure
The department is structured into an employee health and safety division, which handles workers’ compensation claims against the city. The city is self-insured. When employees get hurt on the job, the city administers the claims and pays the medical bills.

The volume of workers’ compensation claims against the city decreased by 3.4 percent in 2003-04, from 1,414 to 1,366 claims. Costs, however, have increased 2.3 percent from $19.3 million to $19.7 million. The decline is being attributed to accident and injury prevention programs.

Danaj explains the relatively small increase in claims reflects significant progress in controlling costs by controlling claims.

The department also has an employee benefits division providing health, life, dental and long-term care insurance. It also provides a defined benefits pension program and a host of optional benefits such as flexible
spending accounts. Employees pay for the benefits according to agreements made by the ten collective bargaining units representing them.

The department also has an employment services division and a training and development division, which work to facilitate the timely hiring of employees and build employees’ capacity.

“The people in San Jose have a lot to be proud of here in their City Hall despite some of the things they may end up reading in the paper,” he says.

Stage manager
Danaj’s compares himself to a stage manager. He also likens city employees who provide direct services to residents, like a building inspector or firefighter, to actors in a play on the stage. He and the strategic support employees are the stage managers.

“We’re the ones behind the scenes, making sure the lights are going on, that the curtains are being raised at the right time and that the music sound is scored properly. Our job is to make sure that those actors are everything they can be so that the front line service provider can give the best to the citizens,” he says. “Often times we might be jealous of the limelight that the actors get, but we take seriously our responsibility to support and enable the rest of the organization.”

Danaj comes from a small family. His father was in the Army, settling in the northern suburbs of Chicago in Fort Sheridan, Ill. His mother was born in Austria and was a homemaker who worked her entire life to help support the family. They reside in Illinois.

He received a bachelor of arts degree in political science and economics from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., in 1991.

He then went to work for the Lake County Administrator’s Office in Chicago, Ill., as a research analyst. Lake County is the third largest county in Illinois located in the northern suburbs of Chicago. He spent two years in that post “cutting his teeth” on budgets.

In the summer of 1994 he spent three months in Nagoya, Japan, working as a consultant for a Japanese manufacturing company as part of a Notre Dame University-sponsored student internship program.

In May of 1995, he obtained a master’s in business administration in finance from the University of Notre Dame graduate School of Business and Management. He returned to his previous post, continuing to work in the Lake County Administrator’s Office becoming an assistant county manager.

He married his wife, Kate, in October 1995. She did graduate work at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. His two sons, Gabriel and Joshua, were born in 2001 and 2002 and are 17 months apart.