HOW WE MAKE OUR FRIENDS FEEL BETTER

In a surprising number of conversations in recent months, we find that political tensions are depressing our friends and giving them a sense that government has ceased to function in a way that gives them hope for the future. And that’s when we try to cheer them up ( at least a little bit). We point out that cities, counties and states are doing a good number of positive things – in both red and blue portions of the country.

Sometimes, this takes a little convincing. The pages of highly esteemed national newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal are overwhelmed with politics, leaving little room for talk of management, performance and policy at the state or local levels.

While we don’t believe in conspiracies, we’ve come to call this phenomenon, the “conspiracy to depress us all.”

So, as Thanksgiving approaches later this week, it felt like it might be an appropriate time of year to give some credit to the good news that we see every day. We’ve gone through some of our Management Update items from recent months and here are eight examples of reasons to give thanks.

• To bolster the public sector workforce, many states have reduced degree requirements as well as other qualifications traditionally required for employment – therefore opening up jobs for workers with skills (or the ability to acquire skills). According to a National Governors Association brief, “These actions—often through executive orders and legislation—have helped address workforce shortages, advanced skills-based hiring, and accelerated a broader national policy conversation. Importantly, they also highlight the outsized role of the public sector as the largest employer in most states.”

  
  

• There’s a general sense among residents, and even employees, of local governments, that the job of HR is limited to internal functions that administer leave policies, appraise employee performance, manage compensation and classification systems, post job openings and deal with recruitment, hiring and retention. But a new study, created through a collaboration between UKG, Polco and Barrett and Greene (the two of us), powerfully demonstrated that there are statistically significant correlations between HR effectiveness and resident satisfaction with government and quality of life.

  
  

• One of the advantages of working in the public sector is that there can be opportunities to work for agencies that deliver a wide variety of services to the public. In an effort to emphasize this point, on July 21, the Mississippi State Personnel Board organized a successful “intern fair,” which attracted some 92 interns (from 19 agencies) who were able to get a quick education about the wide variety of jobs available in the state – particularly useful information to interns who may not have seen a future in the agency for which they were currently working.

  
  

• A data warehouse created by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health in 2017, now holds more than  6 billion data records representing Massachusetts residents, with care given to the protection of privacy. One example of the warehouse's dramatic benefits: “cross-sector data from the warehouse was used to identify people at significantly higher risk of opioid-related overdose death and then informed the design and implementation of a program that reduced that population’s mortality by more than half.”

  
  

• Orange County, California, the sixth largest county in the United States, has a current computer system that had expanded into 21 separate systems over 30 years. But its Auditor-Controller Andrew Hamilton has been bringing his county a giant step forward by building an innovative cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.  It's estimated to save the county $45 million over the next ten years. “We had proposers call this the most integrated system of its type in the entire United States” says Hamilton.

  
  

• Non-emergency 311 calls are a remarkably rich source of data which cities can use in a variety of ways, With that in mind, New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has established an interactive dashboard, which “allows the user to identify certain agencies or complaint types experiencing a high public demand for service and geographical concentration of such service demands. The performance measurement tool is particularly sophisticated in that it filters out duplicate complaints and according to the Comptroller’s office, it will be used “by the public for local advocacy efforts, elected officials for fiscal and operational planning and response efforts or city agencies for allocating resources.”

  
  

• Last spring, the National Association of Counties launched a new Childcare Supply Network, with a focus on strengthening childcare systems to support workforce and county economic development needs. “You can’t have a healthy workforce if your workforce doesn’t have care for their children,” says Ashleigh Holland, chief program officer at NACo. “The Childcare Supply Network is focused on helping counties center childcare services as part of their countywide economic development and workforce development strategies.

  
  

• The startlingly positive news on the drug front is that was a 27 percent decrease in drug related deaths between 2023 and 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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