City leadership adds team engagement to priority list

City Council joined staff leadership for a strategic workshop on Tuesday, March 22 to identify council priorities for the upcoming year.

During the meeting, council supported adding a fifth priority of “Team & Workforce Engagement” to their previously established priorities: “Quality of Place,” “Operational Excellence,” “Fiscal Sustainability” and “Economic Hub.” 

“The city has operated with four strategic priorities for many years,” said City Manager Sandra Wilson. “We knew we were missing a fifth priority, focused around people/workforce, and began working to develop and deploy a citywide team engagement survey about two to three years ago.”

“We recognize if we aren’t successful in hiring and retaining the right people, keeping them safe, engaged and providing training and development, we will not be successful in meeting any of the other strategic priorities,” she said. “The annual team engagement survey results will be just one indicator we use to measure the city’s overall workforce engagement.” 

At the start of Tuesday’s workshop, consultant David Harrawood of Baldridge Group shared the results from a City of Ocala employee engagement survey taken during the months of November and December 2021 of all city departments except for the Ocala Police Department, which declined to participate.

Harrawood told council that employee responses suggested high levels of overall satisfaction. According to the survey, 89.18% of employees responded with “agree” or “strongly agree” to survey questions pertaining to their job, their leader, their team and future job growth within city government.

The consultant pointed out that those who selected “strongly agree” (46.19% of employees) ranked at least 10% higher than what the Gallup Corporation reported nationally for employee engagement trends over the past two decades.

In order to make employees feel safe when giving their honest feedback, the consultant explained that each employee was given a paper survey to complete, and each department polled employees to pick who they trusted most to collect all the surveys and place them in an preaddressed envelope to the consultant. 

Some departments chose to customize their surveys with additional questions to explore some of the issues specific to their departments—examples of such departments were fire, electric and engineering.

In addition to responding to survey questions, employees were asked to prioritize which survey questions they felt were most important. The consultant told city officials that they should take note that employees especially prioritized the survey question relating to whether or not they felt their leader cared about them and valued them each as a person. 

Employees also prioritized communication and knowing what is expected of them in the workplace. 

The consultant said that Ocala Fire Rescue (OFR) received the highest “satisfied” and “very satisfied” results from any fire department he had ever seen.

Councilmember Jay Musleh asked Ocala Fire Chief Clint Welborn and Ocala Electric Utility (OEU) Director Doug Peebles during the workshop why they believed OFR and OEU had maintained such high levels of job satisfaction after so much turmoil and turnover in each respective department over the last year.

Welborn credited it to OFR’s family-like atmosphere. 

“Everybody is on board and valued,” he added. “And the leaders care, all across the board: from the fire chief all the way to the captains. I think that has really helped.” 

Regarding OEU, Peebles said, “I think it’s just from being a team for so long, listening and trying to understand what the issues are, and then making those adjustments. I think that was probably the most important thing for us moving forward.” 

Wilson said that the biggest take away from the citywide team engagement survey is that, as managers, the city cannot presume what is most important to its employees.

“If we don’t make the effort to ask, we are simply guessing at what they need to be productive, effective, safe and engaged,” said Wilson, adding that frequently those “guesses” will be based on staff’s personal biases and experiences and not necessarily aligned with what employees really want and need.

“By simply asking for their input, we can ‘cheat on the test,’” she explained, “because our employees have given us the answers.”

Editor’s Note:

Next week’s edition will cover other highlights of the meeting.