DATE: July 5, 2016
TO: Mayor and City Council
FROM: Assistant City Manager
SUBJECT
Title
FY 2016 Employee Engagement Survey Results
End
RECOMMENDATION
Recommendation
That the Council receives this report on the FY 2016 Employee Engagement Survey and provides comments.
Body
BACKGROUND
The Great Recession brought significant and lasting changes to the City of Hayward, as it did to both public and private organizations everywhere. Significant contributions and modifications to employee compensation packages were necessary to maintain the high level and quality of service that the City provides to its residents without cutting staff positions. These necessary budget-balancing measures resulted in some contentious labor negotiations and residual diminished morale in parts of the organization.
Meanwhile, emerging conditions in the local government sector require an energized, engaged, and effective workforce. Demand for high quality services continues to rise, absent funding for corresponding staffing increases. The long-anticipated “gray wave” of public sector retirements and ensuing loss of seasoned, dedicated, and knowledgeable employees continues. Personnel costs continue to rise, stretching limited public budgets, while the regional labor market thrives and increases competition among employers for highly-trained, committed, and enthusiastic individuals.
As Hayward continues to recover from the Recession and the City organization attempts to address the evolving challenges facing local governments everywhere, it is imperative that the organization understand how to better attract, retain, and develop high-quality employees. Like many other forward-thinking public and private organizations, the City recognizes that organizational health and culture are crucial to positioning the City of Hayward as a competitive employer of choice, particularly given the City’s constrained ability to adjust compensation packages (<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html>).
To that end, staff has been working on an organizational health effort beginning with Hayward’s first employee engagement survey to assess the City’s strengths and opportunities as an employer as well as areas for improvement. These efforts to assess and improve employee engagement support the Council’s Organizational Health priority.
DISCUSSION
Last summer, staff began evaluating consultants to administer the survey and provide analysis of the results. While more costly than creating and administering the survey in-house, hiring a consultant allowed the City to preserve employee anonymity and benchmark Hayward’s results against those of other organizations in the consultant’s database. Staff selected the Hay Group’s Employee Effectiveness Survey due to its multi-dimensional assessment of both employee engagement - an employee’s passion for their work and commitment to the organization resulting in discretionary effort - and employee enablement-whether or not the employee has the tools and processes needed to succeed in their work. These two dimensions are crucial to achieving organizational effectiveness.
Working with the Hay Group and the Executive Team, staff assembled sixty-six Likert scale and four open-ended questions to include in the survey. All permanent City employees were invited to participate in the survey: a total of 795 eligible participants. The survey was administered electronically using the Hay Group’s online data collection software.
The survey was open from October through December 2015. During that time, the technology training room at City Hall was open to all City employees for computer access to complete the survey. Staff from Human Resources and the City Manager’s Office visited other worksites throughout the City with laptops and refreshments to provide an opportunity for field staff without regular access to computers to complete the survey. City staff sent emails and posted fliers announcing the survey, reminding staff to participate, and thanking the organization at the close of the survey.
Survey Results
A total of 62% of employees responded to the survey, surpassing the 50% participation goal set by staff and the Hay Group. This goal was established based on the Hay Group’s past experience with agencies conducting this type of survey for the first time. All City work groups were represented in the survey. Participants rated a series of statements on a five-point scale based on their level of agreement with the statement. The Hay Group then categorized these responses into favorable, neutral, or unfavorable categories, and displayed these categories as a response rate to each question. Additionally, analysts reviewed “key driver” questions - about discretionary effort, pride in the organization, productivity, and interesting work - to produce evaluations of employee engagement and enablement in Hayward.
Each employee responding to the survey was categorized by the Hay Group as having a low or high level of engagement and a low or high level of enablement based on their responses to the “key driver” questions. Engagement is defined as the “want to” component of employee effectiveness - the commitment, passion, and discretionary effort that drive high performance. Enablement is the “can do” element - whether or not employees have the resources, workflow, and skills necessary to excel in their positions. In the matrix below (Figure 1), the percentage of employees in each profile is represented and benchmarked against both general industry (other government agencies) and high performing organizations in both the public and private sectors.
Figure 1: Employee Engagement & Enablement Matrix
The four profiles included in the matrix are as follows:
• Detached: With high enablement but low engagement, employees show lower levels of commitment and effort despite supportive work environments.
• Most effective: When employees are engaged and enabled, they feel productive and efficient, willing and able to perform at their best.
• Least effective: Employees with low levels of both engagement and enablement are likely to perform well below their potential.
• Frustrated: It is difficult to sustain high engagement when enablement is low. Over time, employees’ motivation will fade and at worst, they may leave.
The majority of City of Hayward employees who responded fell into the “Most effective” category, similar to the rest of the Hay Group’s database of government organizations. To be an employer of choice, the City’s goal is to match, if not exceed, 55% - the percentage of “Most effective” employees in high performing organizations.
Communicating the Results
The results of the survey were rolled out through the organization to different groups in a variety of ways.
Executive Team Retreats: Members of the Executive Team reviewed citywide results with a consultant from the Hay Group and participated in an action planning session to identify priorities for action prior to the roll out to the entire organization. Executive Team members also received survey results specific to their departments. The Team met again after the conversations with the City Manager and the departmental conversations (described below) to confirm the priorities for action and steps the Team wanted to take moving forward.
Management Update: The City Manager and Assistant City Manager presented the citywide survey results to the larger management team during the March 17th Management Update meeting. The presentation was recorded and made available to all City employees on the City intranet. Additionally, the slide deck was distributed via Everyone Email along with a link to the recorded presentation.
Departmental Conversations: Department directors (with the exception of the City Clerk, due to data limitations) have been provided with reports and slide decks detailing department-specific survey results, and have held conversations with their employees to discuss departmental results in a variety of ways.
Conversations with the City Manager: Recognizing that the survey results identified communication as an area of opportunity for improvement, the City Manager held twenty-one “Conversations with the City Manager” meetings at which she discussed the organization-wide results of the survey with employees. These meetings were held at various locations throughout the City, including the Corp Yard, Water Pollution Control Facility, Fire Station #6 Training Center, Hayward Police Department, and the Animal Shelter. Employees had an opportunity to review and discuss the results of the survey with the City Manager. Specific concerns or issues raised during these conversations were shared with department directors and many of the “quick fix” issues have already been addressed. Employees who participated in the conversations identified intra-organizational communication and a lack of opportunities to connect with other City employees as issues to address in the longer term.
Innovative Problem Solving: One of the teams in the recent Lean Accelerator program focused on addressing engagement issues that were identified in the survey. The Employee Engagement team began by conducting interviews with forty-eight employees to gain empathy and insight into their working experiences by learning what they enjoy specifically about their jobs, what challenges they face, and the projects they are most passionate about working on. They discovered that employees want to feel more connected to department and City leadership, and that employees have ideas on how to improve city operations but feel they do not have opportunities to share their ideas. Lastly, the group discovered employees do not want to feel ignored or dismissed when they ask for what they need to do their job.
The group developed “Game On,” an initiative that pairs frontline staff members with various department directors and managers to participate in recreational activities with the goal of making City leadership more accessible to staff. In the first round of Game On, twenty-two staff members have visited the Hayward Area Historical Society, volunteered at the animal shelter, or participated in another activity with an executive of their choice. Initial feedback from participating staff, and executives has been highly positive. After conducting all of the follow up interviews, the team will determine whether to persevere with the concept or to pivot and try some additional experiments to address the concerns raised in the initial empathy interviews.
The Lean Accelerator group also plans to continue the lean innovation process in the months ahead to continue to explore additional ways to enhance employee engagement. This will also help the City’s leadership team gain insights into actions the City can take to improve the organizational culture.
FISCAL IMPACT
The City of Hayward, at its core, is a service organization. If our employees don’t experience high levels of engagement and enablement with their work and their organization, the fiscal and political costs of this can be very high. Numerous studies in both the public and private sector have demonstrated the tremendous value-add that investment in employee engagement efforts can have. Increasing employee engagement at the City could have significant fiscal impact in the following ways:
• High levels of employee engagement increase retention and organizational stability and lower rates of absenteeism, turnover, and accidents, reducing personnel costs.
• Engaged and enabled employees are more innovative and productive, allowing them to accomplish more with fewer resources.
• Organizations with highly engaged and enabled employees have high levels of customer satisfaction and service quality. In a municipal organization like Hayward, customer satisfaction and service quality create a more attractive destination for developers and business owners, and a community where residents trust, and will invest in, their local government.
NEXT STEPS
Improving the City’s organizational culture is not a discrete project or set of activities - this is an effort that will require continuous and constant attention as well as dedicated resources (both monetary and personnel). Over the next eighteen months, the organizational health team will focus on continuing to communicate the survey results and address more of the issues raised in the survey and subsequent conversations. Some of the planned actions include:
• Improving Communication: Staff is exploring methods for sharing information with the entire organization that go beyond email. Additionally, management is addressing specific issues of miscommunication that have surfaced in the process of sharing survey results.
• Addressing Sources of Frustration: The Hay Group suggests that the most impactful way to increase the number of employees profiled as “Most effective” is to address the barriers “Frustrated” employees face in the course of their work. Employees in the “Frustrated” profile tend to behave in one of three ways - they will find ways to overcome the barriers they face, risking burnout; stop trying in the face of limited opportunities for success; or leave for workplaces with conditions that will support their motivation. Using Lean Innovation practices, staff is working on identifying and alleviating some of the frustrations facing our employees, which thus far have included feeling disconnected from and unheard in the organization.
Providing Opportunities to Come Together as an Organization: In response to feedback shared during the Conversations with the City Manager meetings, staff is working on organizing activities that give opportunities for employees to get to know each other outside of their daily work. Our employees say that knowing who they work with makes them feel more connected to the organization and makes getting their day-to-day work done easier.
• Continuing the Lean Innovation Process: The Accelerator team will continue to use lean innovation methods - including empathy interviewing, rapid prototyping, and design thinking principles - to explore additional means of improving employee engagement throughout the organization. Continuing the lean innovation process will allow the teams to quickly identify programs and policies to effectively enhance employee engagement without expending significant resources, including staff time, on ultimately ineffective or unnecessary strategies.
Another crucial next step will be re-administering the survey to measure progress made in addressing issues driving employee engagement and enablement in our organization. Staff plans on re-administering the survey in fall FY 2018.
Prepared by: Laurel James, Management Fellow
Staff contact
Recommended by: Kelly McAdoo, Assistant City Manager
end
Approved by:
Fran David, City Manager
Attachments:
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Attachment I |
FY 2016 Employee Engagement Survey Results |
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Attachment II |
What We Heard: Responses FY 2016 Employee Engagement Survey Free-Form Questions |
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Attachment III |
Conversations with the City Manager Flyer |