Case Study 1
ORGANIZATION CULTURE IN A COUNTY GOVERNMENT
The dialogue had effectively shifted from "this is how bad it" to "here are some ways we can make a difference."
Traditionally government has been considered as the more stable employment environment when compared to the private sector, and as such, typically boasts lower turnover and longer tenures of employment. Reasons for this include benefit packages that surpass private sector, family friendly work environments that typically allow employees to flex work schedules to attend to family, and low amounts of overtime. However, in the past decade or more, the trend has shifted due to a number of variables, as in the case of this county government which was experiencing a drain of employees, most often in the first three years of employment. The human resource team showed a chart that showed an inverse relationship between years of service and turnover, i.e., the greater the years of service, the lower the rate of turnover.
Initially, a committee of department directors convened to discuss this issue and a host of related issues that pointed to low morale among employees. The consultant was asked to sit in and observe during the initial meetings and during this period she primarily listened to concerns directed at the way the county pays and rewards employees. After several meetings, still unsure of the direction the committee was headed, she met with the County Administrator to raise questions regarding the intent and purpose of the committee. The County Administrator pulled out a mission statement that stated the mission was to create a government operation that was efficient, cost effective and customer friendly. This statement was supported by belief statements that clarified what the elected officials wanted to emphasize. The County Administrator said, “The task of this committee is to figure out how we can best accomplish this.”
The consultant returned to the next committee meeting with mission and valued belief statements in hand. She began to ask questions about what people thought, and how the picture envisioned by the mission and value statements differed from the current reality. Once the committee began to identify and describe the current reality, conversation began to take shape as the committee discussed strategies and priorities to affect change throughout the organization. The dialogue had effectively shifted from “this is how bad it is” to “here are some ways we can make a difference.”
The group began to take ownership and demonstrated this through a commitment to work together every two weeks for the purpose of advancing a major overhaul of the pay and rewards system which focused on determining what was critical for success, communicating what success looked like in the organization and rewarding contributions by employees toward that definition of success.