September City Council Message
By: Barry Joffe, Contact this Councilmember
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City Employees Embrace High Performance Culture
Our 2005 citizen survey revealed that 97% of households are “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the quality of life in Montgomery; 85% felt the city was responsive to their request when they contacted the city and 95% felt their household member was treated courteously. This level of citizen satisfaction is not achieved just by accident. And while we on Council feel gratified by these results, the perspective that we can always do better no matter how good we think we are, is what marks our high performance drive.
Why develop a High Performance Organization?
“We strive for an HPO culture because we want better customer service, we want to maximize staff and financial resources and use our employees to their fullest potential for the betterment of the organization and the city”, declared Fire Chief Paul Wright, who together with City Manager Cheryl Hilvert and Assistant City Manager Wayne Davis, champions the city’s efforts internally.
For the City, this has meant abandoning a top down style of management and empowering employees to commit to a course of action based on their assessment of what is “the right thing” to do in a given set of circumstances and taking ownership for those actions. In providing me an update on progress, the three enthused about “our road to HPO” harking back to the training they received at the University of Virginia.
And few of us realize that our city has emerged with a national and international reputation as a leader in the implementation of a high performance culture, endorsed by the university, “mother ship” for the dissemination of the HPO concept in government organizations. Our team has delivered presentations at the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and teaches classes as part of ICMA University. “We are contacted by other cities to provide presentations and advice on their paths to implementation” explained Cheryl Hilvert.
It has been a challenging road to navigate through organizational change. Employees have had to learn to move beyond their narrow organizational silos and
find solutions to situations outside of their technical comfort zone. And this has affected every part of the human resource system as job descriptions
needed to be rewritten with less emphasis on technical skills and a greater focus on leadership, management and team skills.
HPO in Action
Since implementing HPO in 2001, several city task teams have emerged. A notable example is the efforts of a crossfunctional employee Health Care benefits team that has just reported to Council on the outstanding results they achieved in containing costs as they renegotiated the city’s health, dental and life insurance benefits. The percentage change in premium rates that this team has accomplished over the last five years in comparison to changes seen in Public Sector premium rates in Greater Cincinnati is a truly remarkable example of cost containment for the city while securing the “right” coverage for employees.
Or witness the results of our Traffic Safety Team who were able to reduce the incidence of four “failure to yield” accidents a week and three injury
accidents a month opposite Columbia Oldsmobile prior to 2004 to a record of zero “failure to yield” accidents since that time by studying the problem
and implementing a solution. The time invested to study this and find a solution compared to the time and resources used to deal with the accidents, not to
mention the dangers, represented a return on investment to the city of 12:1!
Yet another example is the award-winning presentation “Caught in the Web” initiated and developed by one of our patrol officers and our school resource officer. Designed to help parents and students better understand the dangers of internet sites such as MySpace, Face book and Xanga, it has been presented to regional school districts reaching over 4,000 students and 800 parents.
Not to mention the numerous individual situations where employees have raised the bar in service. Witness the time an elderly couple got stuck in their trailer on I-71 and our officers brought the couple into the fire station and arranged for them to get dinner from Montgomery Inn; or the elderly resident who was involved in an accident on his way to Subway to get dinner for his ailing wife. The officer took him to Subway, bought the food and took it to the resident’s wife.
Through our nurturing of an HPO culture, these kinds of behaviors whether in the context of a project team or individual effort, are being molded into the
fabric of our organization. These are the individual encounters that elevate the citizen appreciation of the city to levels seldom achieved by other cities
of our size and for which we can feel rightly proud to declare: “We live in a quality (driven) city!”