1. Going from good to great
Employee Engagement
Going from good to great
Hello! I am Ken Nordhoff, City Manager of Walnut Creek. It’s great to see so many people who care about local government.
How many of you are, or aspire to be, a leader in your organization (show of hands)
How many of you aspire to lead a mediocre organization?
Neither do I.
We all want to be part of great organizations doing great work.
So you can imagine how I felt when we did an employee engagement survey nearly two years ago and got this result:

2. Walnut Creek Employee Engagement - 2015
How would you like to be part of an organization with those numbers? Definitely mediocre.
The good news is that we turned those numbers around in just one year, thanks to a comprehensive employee engagement strategy.
Today, I’m going to talk about what we did -- and what we learned along the way.
But first – why does employee engagement matter?

3. The single most important tool to creating a great organization is to have great employees.
For those of us in the public sector, it is especially important to have great employees because they are THE resource that helps us accomplish our mission, serving our communities.
But, we have unique challenges in attracting and retaining the best and brightest. The Great Recession had a lasting impact on staffing levels, benefits and salaries.
And we aren’t just competing with other public sector agencies for great employees ... in many cases, we are also competing with the private sector. We can’t pay big bonuses, we can’t give stock options, we can’t have extravagant parties.
But we can engage our employees, and that is a powerful tool to attract and retain the very people who can transform a good agency into a great one.
Effective employee engagement creates a circle of success. Engaged employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization and put discretionary effort into their work.
This results in better outcomes for the community and for our employees, who are then further inspired to do great work.
I think we can all agree employee engagement is a good thing. But how to get there?
In Walnut Creek, we set out to develop a program that supports employees both professionally and personally. After much discussion about possible names, we decided to simply call the program “CARE.”
Here are the 4 steps we took to create the CARE program

4. Commit
Step 1 – Commit. You have to be willing to go all in if your engagement program is going to succeed –
We started by getting buy-in from the Executive Team and managers to support the program and provide opportunities for employees to participate.
They agreed to commit the time to do this right. This is a big change, and change takes time.
We dedicated an entire year to create and roll-out the CARE program. And, we have committed another 3 years to get this fully implemented.

5. Assess STEP 2 – ASSESS – Where are you today?
Asking employees how engaged they are can be an act of courage. You can use a number of tools to measure employee engagement. We chose to use an outside vendor who provided a detailed, highly statistical report, that focused on engagement, rather than satisfaction.
One of my favorite quotes is “Don’t ask the question if you aren’t ready to hear the answer.”
To refresh your memory, here is the answer we got:

6. Walnut Creek Employee Engagement - 2015
While we weren’t thrilled with our low engagement rating, we had a clear baseline upon which we could measure future success.
In addition to surveying employees, we inventoried the positive things we were already doing. This step is important for 2 reasons.
First, it respects those staff members who are already working on employee engagement.
Second, an inventory will help you measure how close you are to having the pieces of the puzzle necessary to build an engagement program unique to your organizational culture

7. Involve STEP 3 - INVOLVE – Where do we want to go?
With our baseline and inventory in place, it was time to talk about the future. What kind of organization did we want to be, and how would we get there?
To tackle those questions, we assembled a critique team of 17 employees from all levels and departments of the organization. They provided invaluable suggestions and feedback during the development of the CARE program, including feedback on the name itself.
Today, they are our CARE champions, sharing their excitement about the program with their colleagues.

8. STEP 4 – COMMUNICATE. We recognized that it was important to brand this program in a way that spoke to current and future employees.
So we got rid of the HR jargon and chose simple words that capture the essence of what we want to provide -- a framework of choices to find opportunity, connection and balance in the workplace
We used many methods to get the word out … s, flyers, our Intranet.
And we went old school, too, with s face to face communication. The Human Resources Director and I went to more than 20 small group meetings, where people could ask questions and share their ideas.
All of this took a significant commitment of time – not to mention that some of these meetings took place very early in the morning or late at night, to accommodate a wide range of work shifts. But the return on investment was well worth it. By the time we were done, 30 employees had signed up to work on a variety of CARE projects.
Some of those projects were simple and came with little or no cost: an ice cream social at different locations, where the City Manager was in charge of scooping ice cream, or a lunchtime series of presentation by our police officers focusing on personal safety.
Other projects were more elaborate, such as our first Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day.
Communicate

9. This represented a major investment in staff time to plan and pull off, but you can see from the faces in this photo that the results were worth it.
One year after we launched CARE, we took a deep breath and took another survey of our employees.

10. Lessons Learned Walnut Creek Employee Engagement - 2016
Overall, I am very happy with these results. We have significantly moved the dial. A year ago, close to half of Walnut Creek employees fell into the disengaged category. Today, that number has dropped to 26 percent.
Even better, more than half of our employees are fully in the engaged category. I can feel their energy and enthusiasm throughout our organization. People are excited to come to work, and they are doing great things.
Of course, employee engagement is not a one-off “check the box” activity. As an organization, we are committed to continuing to invest in our CARE program, building upon what we learned in Year 1.

11. Lessons Learned Support from the top, but not top-down
Be clear on what you can deliver
Know your survey tool BEFORE you use it
Look for talent in unexpected places
Design with the “whole person” in mind
CLICK – 1ST BULLET POINT
Get support from the top, but do NOT make engagement a top-down program. Enlist employees from all departments and levels of your organization in creating and implementing the program. Their enthusiastic support is the best promotion of employee engagement possible!
CLICK – 2ND BULLET POINT
Understand your organization’s capacity and be clear on what you can deliver. It’s better to create a multi-year approach than to take on too many new programs in year one and wear everyone out.
CLICK – 3RD BULLET POINT
Whatever survey tool you decide on, understand fully how it works, and agree in advance what will be shared with the organization and how.
CLICK – 4TH BULLET POINT
Look for talent in unexpected places, and give people permission to do something outside of their normal scope of work. Our Clean Water Program Manager volunteered to research and write our new flexible work policy, and she did an outstanding job.
CLICK – 5TH BULLET POINT
Design an engagement program with the “whole person” in mind. Provide an array of options, with something for everyone depending on their place in career and personal life. For instance, an employee starting a new family will have different needs than a seasoned employee

12. Remember, you are creating a circle of success
Remember, you are creating a circle of success. Engaged employees will do great things for your organization and your community – and they will want to continue doing so.
In closing –
Care about your people.
Feed their passions!
Go create a culture of greatness!

13. walnut-creek.org/care