Building Employee Engagement in Family City USA

Orem, Utah or “Family City USA” is committed to treating their employees like family and making the city of Orem an amazing place to work. In this insightful episode we dive deep with Mayor Dave Young, Keri Rugg, and Carson Hardy about how to implement a comprehensive survey aimed at understanding employee sentiments, needs, and expectations.

From Mayor Young’s vision to Keri Rugg’s strategic insights and Carson Hardy’s on-the-ground execution, they share the collaborative effort that led to a successful employee engagement initiative. The podcast delves into the creation of Innovation Teams (I-teams) to analyze, discuss, and take action with the survey results.

Whether you’re a city leader looking to boost employee engagement or an HR professional seeking innovative strategies, this podcast offers practical insights and lessons learned from a successful employee survey initiative.

Podcast Transcript:

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:18:06
Keri Rugg
But I would say my advice to future leadership is in other organizations is to not be afraid to do a survey, because if you want to just stay in the dark and you’re worried that the results aren’t going to be positive or that you’re not going to be able to satisfy employees once you know what their problems are.

00:00:18:08 – 00:00:36:21
Keri Rugg
I don’t think it’s ever best practice to just put your head in the sand and just hope for the best. And without knowing what the problems are or what areas that we can improve on, we can never get better. So don’t be afraid to do that. That would be my biggest advice, is don’t be afraid to get that survey.

00:00:36:24 – 00:00:49:19
Keri Rugg
And then once you do have the results, take action because if you don’t, you will lose even more respect from employees if you don’t take any action from with the results.

00:00:49:21 – 00:01:22:04
Ryan Young
Welcome to OnPointe with Ron Gailey, where we meet with city leaders to discuss pressing issues, best practices and ways that citizens and leaders come together to build their communities. City and municipal leaders have some of the toughest jobs in America. They’re bombarded by expectations and conflicting demands. This podcast explores how successful leaders navigate that complexity. And now your host CEO and founder of OnPointe Insights, Ron Gailey.

00:01:22:07 – 00:01:27:05
Ron Gailey
Ryan, nice to see you again. And you see we have the people from Orem with us.

00:01:27:08 – 00:01:29:26
Ryan Young
Super excited to talk with Orem.

00:01:29:29 – 00:01:59:07
Ron Gailey
Orem Utah is south of Salt Lake City. Probably 20-25 minutes and and it’s at the base of the mountains there under Mt. Timpanogos. It’s just the most beautiful place, a great setting and a place I love to visit. And we worked with Dave Young, who’s the mayor, and Keri, who’s the management services director, and Carson, who is uh, Carson,

00:01:59:08 – 00:02:04:06
Ron Gailey
you’re just kind of like a manager, an account manager of some sort, Right? What do you do?

00:02:04:13 – 00:02:07:18
Carson Hardy
Yeah, I am a management analyst for the city.

00:02:07:18 – 00:02:28:08
Ron Gailey
A management analyst? Well, anyway, they keep him busy, and I know why. Because he’s very good. And so anyway, it’s good to have the three of them. And we worked with or, sometime ago on a staff survey and we’ll talk a little bit about the staff survey that we did with them. But actually they have a good story to tell anyway about their city.

00:02:28:10 – 00:02:54:03
Ron Gailey
And I thought it was fascinating enough that and useful enough for any city leader to hear what the people of Orem had been working on as a leadership team, as the mayor, and as as employed the leaders of the city to talk about some of the things that they’ve been doing. And so thank you all for coming and joining us today and visiting with us and early on.

00:02:54:08 – 00:03:02:22
Ron Gailey
Why don’t we just begin and Mayor Young would you, if you’d introduce yourself just a little bit and then Kari and then Carson and just a couple of minutes.

00:03:02:24 – 00:03:09:28
Mayor Dave Young
Okay. I’m Dave. I am the mayor of Orem currently. What else would you like to know.

00:03:10:01 – 00:03:13:02
Ron Gailey
A little bit about your background?

00:03:13:05 – 00:03:33:08
Mayor Dave Young
I I’ve got very varied background. I have. Okay. In 2 seconds I went to BYU. I, I used to have a professional stage show called Grand Illusion. We did over 250 shows all across the Western United States.

00:03:34:00 – 00:04:06:16
Mayor Dave Young
So I’ve been in entertainment. I started a number of businesses from 86 to, you know, from from 79 to 86. A number of franchises and and I sold all those. And in 1986 from that I formed an investment company. And we’ve invested in all things to do with the stock market, the real estate market, a lot of venture capital types of things.

00:04:06:18 – 00:04:30:28
Mayor Dave Young
I’ve been involved in investment markets and I, my wife and I had lived in Orem for 33 years and I talked to my wife about moving somewhere and we had that conversation a few times over the years and she never wanted to move. She likes our house and she likes grow. So I decided, well, people are always complaining about these different issues and all.

00:04:31:03 – 00:04:38:11
Mayor Dave Young
So if I die here, I’m going to see what I can do to fix it. And so I decided to run for mayor. So there you have it.

00:04:38:13 – 00:04:44:16
Ron Gailey
The perfect the perfect leader. All right. And we’ll be glad to hear more from you. Keri, tell us a little bit about you.

00:04:44:18 – 00:05:11:10
Keri Rugg
Thanks, Ron. So I work for the city of Orem. For the last almost five years now. I’ve been in local government for over a decade, and before that I worked in the private sector. I have a bachelor’s degree in human resources management and a master’s degree in business management and leadership, which is really my passion, is focusing on teaching the next generation of leaders how they can be successful.

00:05:11:10 – 00:05:30:18
Keri Rugg
And employee engagement is really important to me as well. And I haven’t had kind of an exciting background as Mayor Young with his entertainment career, but I am very passionate about the positive experience that employees can have in the organization, and that really is what I know about what I do.

00:05:30:20 – 00:05:32:19
Ron Gailey
And Carson, Let’s hear about you.

00:05:32:21 – 00:06:01:05
Carson Hardy
Yeah, So, yeah, like mayor, I went to BYU for my undergrad, got my bachelors in Public Relations, actually, and then went on to Texas A&M University to get my master’s in public administration and delve right into local government after that. I worked previously with the city of Mesa in Arizona and then was fortunate enough to be able to get a position here in Utah.

00:06:01:07 – 00:06:26:04
Carson Hardy
I’m a Utah native, was happy to come back to such a great city. We get to do a lot of things here as one of Utah’s largest cities, and this was actually one of the first projects I was tasked with. I’ve been here just under a year, and so this project has been pretty meaningful for my staff and local government.

00:06:26:06 – 00:06:41:15
Ron Gailey
Mayor, when you became mayor of the city of Orem, which has about 100,000 people, a little over 100,000 population. Tell us about what the city was like and some of the challenges you faced as a new mayor.

00:06:41:17 – 00:07:04:20
Mayor Dave Young
How the synthesis I mean, as you mentioned, it’s a beautiful place. It’s got a lot going on. It’s a it’s a really great city. But one of the reasons I ran was there was a disconnect between between the people that lived in Orem and the city council that was elected by the people, and then the city management south.

00:07:04:22 – 00:07:30:11
Mayor Dave Young
And so one of my big goals was to get those three aligned together and on the same page. And so from that, one of the first things we had to do was our city council had always been much more ceremonial. The city management pretty much ran the city and the city council, pretty much rubber things and more ceremonial types of things.

00:07:30:13 – 00:07:56:18
Mayor Dave Young
And that created a disconnect between the people and and the city because the people at times felt like they weren’t being heard. And so, for example, one of the big controversies was was what we had. We had about four 4500 apartments go in in the previous ten or 11 years. And the citizens generally didn’t want that. But the city was pushing that, the city council was going along with it.

00:07:56:21 – 00:08:24:07
Mayor Dave Young
And so in short, we just decided to do what we could to to align those things and make it so that the city council was actually leading the direction proactively of the city. And thereby the citizens were heard and and their voice was heard in that direction. And so that was the path that we we started down two years ago.

00:08:24:10 – 00:08:56:22
Ron Gailey
And what were some of the challenges then? Like, number one, you’re probably one of a of so many thousands of cities that are pretty much functioning that way. And I’ve worked with a variety of them. Right? And the idea of a proactive, leadership oriented mayor and city council is just so refreshing to hear maybe coming over to you, Keri.

00:08:56:22 – 00:09:17:23
Ron Gailey
So can you tell me more about the situation and and then how did you get a handle on making changes when I’m sure that the city if the city managers, the city manager and others were pretty much leading the city, they were not in favor of the mayor and council coming in and taking a bigger role.

00:09:17:25 – 00:09:23:12
Ron Gailey
It would be my guess that help me understand a little bit more about how that went.

00:09:23:14 – 00:10:14:08
Keri Rugg
The mayor could probably speak more to that, but from my perspective, there were some changes administratively that the mayor and council made, and then we were able to reorganize the organization and put together some really important studies that the mayor had suggested. So one of them is this employee engagement study that we did with your team. And we’re also doing an efficiency study with another third party so that we can reorganize the city administration and departments to be more effective and efficient, but in a positive way and in place have been really receptive and excited about a lot of these changes because then, especially with this employee engagement survey, they’ve had an opportunity to give

00:10:14:08 – 00:10:19:17
Keri Rugg
advice and suggestions on things that they’d like to see change here in the organization.

00:10:19:19 – 00:10:20:24
Ron Gailey
No less.

00:10:21:01 – 00:10:50:29
Mayor Dave Young
So, Ron, one of the things, just to clarify, so when we made these changes in city government, there were about a dozen of them that we considered as just for a new city manager to go outside and bring someone else in. And that meant that 30 would be we would find someone who was not in the organization, would come in, bring their expertise, and then try and figure out how to best lay that over the city, you know, in a positive way.

00:10:51:02 – 00:11:11:14
Mayor Dave Young
But as we went through that process, we came to the conclusion that the assistant city manager, Brent Bybee, had all the qualifications to really take the city to the next level. But what we weren’t sure on is if he had the level of expertise and information to be able to do that and so that’s why we decided to do some of these studies.

00:11:11:14 – 00:11:32:04
Mayor Dave Young
We thought that if Brent is very capable and if he’s got the right information, then they can make the best decisions to take the city forward. That’s what Keri was talking about. As far as the survey that you guys did for us, that was to figure out where our employees were out, how happy they were, how effective they were, how just all the different metrics that you measure.

00:11:32:06 – 00:11:55:13
Mayor Dave Young
And then there’s another study that we’re doing where we’re doing more of a management consulting type of study, where we’re going into every department and trying to figure out if they’re optimally structured, if they’re optimally run, if they’ve got good best practices. We’re really trying to understand how well our departments are all being run and then get the information we need to make them the best run.

00:11:55:19 – 00:12:06:25
Mayor Dave Young
And we’re we’re giving that information to the Brent, who is the new city manager. So how about the best information before on that?

00:12:06:27 – 00:12:12:20
Ron Gailey
Are there other things you did to help Brent be successful as your new city manager?

00:12:12:23 – 00:12:38:00
Mayor Dave Young
Well, getting getting good information is huge. And and then and then as far as, like you say, helping Brent be successful, I mean, Brent’s got the capability, he’s got the heart, he’s got the soul, he’s got the, the mindset. So he’s he’s got the tools to make it happen. And we’re just trying to, you know, give him everything he needs to make that happen.

00:12:38:02 – 00:12:49:05
Ron Gailey
Right? Very cool. Hey, Carson. So we did a study for you, a survey for you. Tell me a little bit about your observations. As we began a staff survey for you.

00:12:49:08 – 00:13:14:24
Carson Hardy
Yeah. So this was a neat opportunity for the city to, you know, take advantage of at the direction of of the mayor and the council. You know, they want to make sure, you know, the city’s motto is Family City USA. And they are they really we treat each other as staff, as family. And so family takes care of family.

00:13:14:24 – 00:13:55:07
Carson Hardy
And so this engagement survey was really directed by city leadership to do just that, to figure out how can we listen and get feedback from our employees so that there’s this this interaction between city leadership and staff throughout the entire organization. So with that direction, we were able to work with you to come up with this employee engagement survey with the intent to take feedback from employees is to make the workplace a happy place where they did feel like they were part of the family in Family City, USA.

00:13:55:07 – 00:14:18:23
Carson Hardy
And, you know, once when you have employees engaged to that level, their work becomes that much more meaningful to them. And it just, you know, impacts the entire city, not just the organization of city government, but the city as a whole. And the residents in the services that they receive from those employees.

00:14:18:25 – 00:14:24:11
Ron Gailey
Now, Keri and Dave, hasn’t Orem done an employee survey in the past?

00:14:24:13 – 00:14:41:09
Keri Rugg
Yes, we have. We hadn’t done one in my tenure here. So in the five years since I started, we hadn’t done one, but we have done them in the past. They were very different than the survey that you guys were able to provide for us, but we have done them in the past year.

00:14:41:11 – 00:15:07:04
Mayor Dave Young
But and to say, right. And there were some on the city council that have been skeptical of surveys and and the reason for that is, is because depending on who was doing the survey and how it structured, you can have a push type survey where you can push the results that you want. And so as mayor, city council, we just want to the actual data.

00:15:07:06 – 00:15:30:13
Mayor Dave Young
We didn’t want push data. And so that’s where your firm came in is what I’m when I met you down at St George at that conference and you went through your process and how it worked, I felt like it was very different than a lot of the, the survey companies I’ve seen and then I’ve actually I mean, in my business I work with a ton of data and surveys and studies and that sort of thing.

00:15:30:16 – 00:15:37:24
Mayor Dave Young
I just thought your process was really solid. So that’s why I went back and ambitiously council on doing this.

00:15:37:26 – 00:16:02:07
Ron Gailey
Well, it is different if people on the audience don’t know. I come from a business background myself, so I worked at a couple of major banks and then for Coca-Cola, I worked with them and my job was always to help the executives of my company make decisions. And I couldn’t believe you’d think with Coca-Cola we’d have some of the best surveys on the earth, you know what I mean?

00:16:02:07 – 00:16:31:19
Ron Gailey
You’d think we would, and we did that. But the academic way that a lot of them approach it, it’s just not that useful sometimes for a business leader to make a good decision. And you can introduce fatigue and all kinds of bias. So you’re right, the approach that we took is far more how can we say it? Is it it helps quickly established priorities and then helps quickly understand where the issues are, unimportant factors.

00:16:31:22 – 00:16:33:03
Ron Gailey
And so it’s just a very different approach.

00:16:33:04 – 00:16:44:03
Ryan Young
One of the concerns to the City council have concerning the survey and maybe how did you go about convincing them, just going into this, what were you hoping for and what were you worried about?

00:16:44:06 – 00:16:46:19
Mayor Dave Young
We just didn’t want any kind of bias from the

00:16:46:19 – 00:17:05:10
Mayor Dave Young
group doing the survey in in this situation. That was it was a matter of making sure that there was no bias in that. And a big part of that was, okay, we want to ask the employees the questions, but we did not ask. But we want the survey company to ask the questions and we want

00:17:05:10 – 00:17:07:08
Mayor Dave Young
the employees to feel total confidence

00:17:07:08 – 00:17:11:03
Mayor Dave Young
no matter what they say, it’s not going to hurt them in any way.

00:17:11:03 – 00:17:31:12
Mayor Dave Young
So that way they can be totally honest with what they say. So there was that piece of it. And then our other issue was sometimes employees or, you know, or anyone for that matter is not that enthused about doing a survey. And so we wanted to try and get as high a participation as we possibly could. And so for some things together on that side.

00:17:31:12 – 00:17:40:17
Mayor Dave Young
But that was another issue, really good participation and no chance of any retribution for saying things that, you know, for telling the truth.

00:17:40:19 – 00:17:45:17
Ron Gailey
Like Gary, what were your thoughts?

00:17:45:19 – 00:18:14:07
Keri Rugg
I, I agree with everything that mayor has said. We really wanted to have a holistic approach to this and we wanted to hear from every department and the largest sampling that we could get. So we did something a little unusual that I don’t know that other people have necessarily tried before and we would highly recommend. And that was that we offered a couple of hours of PTO for their participation, and the way that we were able to do that was through OnPointe.

00:18:14:09 – 00:18:32:07
Keri Rugg
They were able to collect the percentage of number of people who had participated without letting us know who hadn’t. And if we reached the 90% participation rate, we were able to give every employee some PTO time off. And Ron, I can’t remember our participation rate, but it was above the 90% mark.

00:18:32:14 – 00:18:36:02
Ron Gailey
Yeah, we get 95% of your full time employees.

00:18:36:04 – 00:18:44:05
Keri Rugg
That’s pretty good when you consider most of them don’t like to read their emails ever that they it was incredible.

00:18:44:07 – 00:19:02:05
Ron Gailey
No, I think it’s I totally agree with you. And I just thought that it went really well. And, you know, Mike, my compliments to you as the city for saying, hey, let’s do an incentive of a little bit of time off. And, you know, we’ve copied that with other cities and we’ve gotten the same like really high participation rate.

00:19:02:07 – 00:19:22:29
Ron Gailey
You know, one got nearly 90, they got like 89, 88% participation rate. But still, if you’re talking a town of this town only had 125 employees as important, you know, you don’t want to get down to just 40 or 50% of your employees taking it. You want a big number.

00:19:23:01 – 00:19:55:06
Carson Hardy
Know, and Ron, if I can add, you know, it wasn’t only important to us to get representative samples from all the departments in the city, but it was also important to actually have action taken based on the survey, which our city is, I think, another, you know, leader in this field. A lot of companies, even in from places I’ve worked in in the past, you know, you take a survey and then you never hear anything again about the survey.

00:19:55:08 – 00:19:58:14
Carson Hardy
It’s like, okay, check the box. We we engage with

00:19:58:14 – 00:20:14:15
Carson Hardy
our staff and they gave us feedback. Let’s just keep doing what we’re doing. But the city leadership here has been very proactive in taking this to the next level rather than just the simple we

00:20:14:15 – 00:20:17:28
Carson Hardy
gave the survey out. Let’s move on with life now. We’re

00:20:17:28 – 00:20:20:05
Carson Hardy
actively engaged with each department.

00:20:20:05 – 00:21:05:07
Carson Hardy
Actually, we’ve created what we call I-teams, innovation teams that we have in our city. And we have an AI team specifically to go over these results from the survey. We’re very transparent with them and open and the employees feel open to communicate about their their ideas, brainstorming concerns. And so with these teams, we’re we’re looking at the data with them, we’re engaging with the staff from the from across the city and creating, you know, actionable items to implement, to improve the engagement and, you know, increase what is already a great response to employee engagement in the city, but just enhancing that.

00:21:05:09 – 00:21:25:15
Carson Hardy
So I really want to tip my hat off to our city leadership. You know, mayor, council, city manager’s office, Gary, for the effort to, you know, take it to the next level and let employees know we are actually listening to you.

00:21:25:18 – 00:21:45:08
Ron Gailey
I love that. I love that. And did you find that you’ve been in on these teams? Were they able to help me understand a little bit about what some of these teams, how easily they’ve been able to use the data to figure out some things to do or to get to creative ideas? I mean, how did that work?

00:21:45:11 – 00:21:54:09
Ron Gailey
Because sometimes, you know, you get survey results and what to do next becomes the big challenge, right. And it doesn’t sound like what to do next was your challenge.

00:21:54:11 – 00:22:22:10
Carson Hardy
Yeah, well, the way we’ve run these teams, we have three separate ones now. The way you have structure of the survey, it was broken up into different categories engagement and meaning benefits. What we did is we took two of those categories out at the time for each meeting and ran these as focus groups with the employees. Yeah, here we go, engagement and meeting on the screen here.

00:22:22:13 – 00:22:47:24
Carson Hardy
So we talked about what the data means, you know, what does okay or very poor mean. What are these? Why are they in the order that they are in, you know, top to bottom on the the importance ranking And that allowed us to, you know, focus the employees on these items to hone in on. Here’s what city staff highly value and here’s how we think we’re doing.

00:22:47:24 – 00:23:09:27
Carson Hardy
So if it if it was something that was very important and had, you know less than 50% that thought it was good, we said, hey, let’s focus on on this topic here. And then we took them through a series of activities to inspire brainstorming and discussions around that topic.

00:23:10:04 – 00:23:10:19
Ron Gailey
I love that.

00:23:10:28 – 00:23:26:08
Carson Hardy
And we use the data to focus the conversation, right? Because there is a million things that you could do as an organization, but focusing the conversation on where the data says things matter is, is where we we went with this.

00:23:26:11 – 00:23:33:24
Ryan Young
That’s brilliant. Do you have any specific examples from a department or a specific session that were noteworthy?

00:23:33:24 – 00:23:54:23
Carson Hardy
I’m not going to speak to anything in particular, but what I do think is noteworthy from all these is how meaningful it was to the employees. They were so excited that we were doing this. I can’t even tell you how excited they were to be there, but it was an open invitation to all staff that wanted to participate.

00:23:54:26 – 00:24:06:20
Carson Hardy
We have the best of the best in the city, so there was high participation and they all had meaningful things to contribute and they were excited that the city values their opinion.

00:24:06:20 – 00:24:16:24
Ryan Young
And what are your recommendations to other city leaders that want to have engaged staff that are happy to come to work? How does the survey plan to that and what else do you need to do?

00:24:16:27 – 00:24:54:00
Keri Rugg
I think I’ll take that one. I would say that a survey is only the very first step. In fact, I consider it the step before you start in that our engagement with employees, because that’s really giving you the baseline on what employees appreciate that you’re doing and the areas that you can improve on. And then you can actually start the process in improving your employee engagement because you have that baseline and you can maybe maybe we’re spending a lot of money on a benefit or a process that that we feel like is of value to employees, but they don’t find any value in that.

00:24:54:02 – 00:25:00:29
Keri Rugg
Then then we know that we can take that allocation of funds and put it into something that they find more value.

00:25:01:05 – 00:25:29:24
Mayor Dave Young
Because you’re asking about for other city leaders. You know, I really think unless you have some kind of survey or some data to base your opinion on. So for example, there’s four of us here in a room or on this plot, five of us on this podcast, we might have different opinions about this, that the other, but unless we really drill down to the facts and the only way you get the facts and not just everyone’s opinions is to have concrete data coming from a survey.

00:25:29:27 – 00:25:37:08
Mayor Dave Young
And so I believe we’ve got to get that foundation before you can do anything meaningful. Otherwise you’re just you’re just kind of guessing where you’re going.

00:25:37:11 – 00:26:12:16
Ron Gailey
Well, as you know, and even with your cities, your city, things went well. 80% said things are going in the right direction and 20% said I’m not. So, so sure about that. Right. And those 20% can be rather destructive sometimes in the way they go about. And yet they can be also very helpful if they have a feeling that it’s not going in the right direction and they have an idea of how to make it better is as a matter of fact, I received a phone call after we were finished from an employee who took it and he was rather concerned that it was biased and that was his concern.

00:26:12:16 – 00:26:33:21
Ron Gailey
And he said, you know, if the city paid for, it is biased. And I said, no, the city paid for it, but I 100% guarantee you it was not biased. You know, I made sure with everything that I could design that they would get the exact feedback they needed. And I said, look, 80%, we’re very, very happy with the way things are going in the city and 20% or not.

00:26:33:21 – 00:27:04:18
Ron Gailey
And my guess is you’re in the 20%. And my guess is you also have friends who are in the 20%. And so it might feel like there’s a lot more people who are negative than there are, but there’s a lot of very satisfied people who are who are working for the city right now. And he actually calmed down and became quite gentlemanly, you know, toward the you know, after we after we explained the process and the steps and the and the reasons why it was done the way it was done, he became quite supportive.

00:27:04:21 – 00:27:10:16
Ron Gailey
And maybe who knows what a year from now brings if you do it again. But but he was a bit negative.

00:27:10:19 – 00:27:35:23
Carson Hardy
Yeah, well that’s why, like the mayor said earlier, I think they were wise in, you know, choosing a third party for that reason. You know, it mitigates any responsibility on the city. We do not you know, you created the questions. You just you disseminated the survey to the to the employees. You collected the data. We you know, so I help it.

00:27:35:24 – 00:28:03:09
Carson Hardy
I think it helps, you know, ease those fears of is there bias? Are they skewing the data or or even help employees feel like they’re not going to be retaliated against because we don’t we can’t drill down and find, you know, so-and-so said this, so let’s make their lives miserable or something. You know, there’s there’s no possibility of that.

00:28:03:09 – 00:28:11:25
Carson Hardy
And I think that helped our response rate. And I think it helped employees feel confident in the actual survey itself.

00:28:11:27 – 00:28:34:24
Ron Gailey
So if a city leader listening to this survey podcast, if they were wondering what advice you might have for anybody who’s wondering about doing something like this, what would you do differently? What would you do differently the next time? What advice would you have for them as they’re considering it? Any thoughts? Keri, What are your thoughts?

00:28:34:27 – 00:29:07:26
Keri Rugg
I don’t know that we would do anything differently other than adding some additional questions of things that had come up after we have done the survey that we’d like to know more about in the future. But I would say my advice to future leadership in in other organizations is to not be afraid to do a survey because if you want to just stay in the dark and you’re worried that the results aren’t going to be positive or that you’re not going to be able to satisfy employees once you know what their problems are, I don’t think it’s ever best practice to just put your head in the sand and just hope for the best and

00:29:07:28 – 00:29:33:18
Keri Rugg
and without knowing what the problems are or what areas that we can improve on, we can never get better. So don’t be afraid to do that. That that would be my biggest advice is don’t be afraid to get that survey. And then once you do have the results, take action because if you don’t, you will lose even more respect from employees if you don’t take any action from with the results.

00:29:33:20 – 00:29:35:06
Ron Gailey
Well, so, Mayor, your thoughts?

00:29:35:06 – 00:29:57:05
Mayor Dave Young
Yeah, and I agree completely with what Keri just said. You know, don’t be afraid to take the survey. You need to know what’s going on in your city. For better or for worse. You really need to know what’s going on and if things are bad. Then it gives you the information that you can fix those. If things are good, it give you information can go to the next level.

00:29:57:08 – 00:30:15:12
Mayor Dave Young
So there’s no reason really not to do that survey. And the second point, it would be the same as hers. Once you take the survey, you’ve got to have a proactive plan to implement it throughout your organization. But the problem, because if you don’t do that, then you might as well not to take it. So anyway.

00:30:15:14 – 00:30:26:24
Ron Gailey
I love it. Carson, having been the one who had to put your head down and work with us on this, What advice would you have for somebody who’s in charge of executing this thing for the city?

00:30:26:25 – 00:30:50:26
Carson Hardy
honestly, I think you can look retroactively at anything you do and critique it and improve it, which is perfectly fine. I think we have lessons learned for next time, but there’s nothing that I would say I would change about the process because it gave us what we were looking for. One of the biggest things that we benefited from were was the investment of our elected officials.

00:30:50:26 – 00:31:20:10
Carson Hardy
And that’s right. They they were the ones Mayor Young championed this and and they were involved throughout the the whole process, which I think is critical to making it successful because, you know, if you’re elected officials are involved in this and actively care, caring about the employees and their engagement in the organization, when you do get to the next step of implementation and action, they’re going to be very supportive of it

00:31:20:10 – 00:31:38:10
Carson Hardy
whether it was, you know, being able to incentivize it with some PTO, being able to do these I-teams and even to fund the survey at the direction of the mayor and council, you know, none of it would have been possible without their buy in and their help.

00:31:38:10 – 00:31:46:03
Carson Hardy
They helped review questions even. They were very involved. And so just involve your your electeds.

00:31:46:06 – 00:31:50:03
Ron Gailey
I love it. Ryan, any final thoughts now?

00:31:50:03 – 00:32:01:25
Ryan Young
It’s been a pleasure hearing from Mayor Young and Keri and Carson. And I’m just glad we got to work with them. And I hope we get to continue to work with all.

00:32:01:28 – 00:32:04:21
Ron Gailey
Yeah. Mayor, final word.

00:32:04:23 – 00:32:18:18
Mayor Dave Young
I think we’ve covered everything. I appreciate him inviting us here to go through this and not that we’ve appreciated working with you. We think you did a great job and and we’ll be on board again.

00:32:18:20 – 00:32:41:24
Ryan Young
Thanks for listening. If you found this discussion valuable, please consider subscribing and sharing with others. If you have a topic or question you’d like to hear. As discussed in our next episode. Leave a comment. Or send us an email. It’s podcast at end point. Dash insights dot com. See you next time.