Industry Insights Leading A Values-Based Organizational Culture

By Sean Barclay, CSDM, General Manager of Tahoe City Public Utility District

In today’s rapidly changing business world, special districts need to find a competitive advantage to ensure recruitment and retention of the best and brightest talent who are willing to commit themselves to a career in public service. Building a strong organizational culture is key to establishing an identity as an “employer of choice” and positioning your district for success into the future.

The Tahoe City Public Utility District (TCPUD) provides drinking water, wastewater collection services and parks and recreation opportunities to customers within a 31 square mile service area along the north and west shores of Lake Tahoe. Together, TCPUD’s outstanding team of 61 full-time employees, and nearly twice that number of seasonal staff, demonstrate our vision and commitment to “building a healthy mountain community through our passion for public service.”

As the General Manager of the Tahoe City Public Utility District (TCPUD), I have the unique opportunity to lead an outstanding organizational culture built on a foundation of core values. For the TCPUD, the core values go beyond a “set of words on a wall” and have been deeply ingrained and aligned at every level of the organization. The path to moving beyond surface level adoption of the core values was not always an easy one, however the benefits have been substantial. Our passion for public service and behavioral alignment has led to high levels of customer satisfaction, improved recruitment and retention, provided valuable supervisory tools and created an engaging, positive workplace for our team members. Notably, TCPUD was recognized (based solely on employee nominations) as the “2023 Best Place to Work” by the North Tahoe Community Alliance.

The following are key areas of focus to consider when evaluating and changing workplace culture:

Establishing Your Core Values

Every organization should establish their own set of core values that are clear and meaningful to their organization. The TCPUD’s transformative journey to a true values-based culture began in 2014 when the organization noticed that employee engagement and morale were not registering at the desired levels. Conflicts among employees had increased and as a result, productivity suffered. To remedy this, we began a year-long process, led by a group of mid-level supervisors, to establish a set of shared core values and associated observable behaviors. The goal of the process was to set forth expectations clearly and intentionally for how team members would be expected to behave with each other, with our customers, and with all our stakeholders. The Values Team worked to document existing positive behaviors that were demonstrated by team members in the district and combined those with new behaviors that would inspire team members toward excellence in serving our community.

After over a year of hard work and a lot of challenging decisions and discussions, the senior management team and Board of Directors supported and adopted the onepage set of formalized Core Values that has become our guiding document.

Moving beyond Surface-Level Adoption

While the creation and adoption of the Core Values was difficult work, the real challenge for TCPUD began in earnest when working to embed the values and behaviors into the culture of the district. A key step in this process was the inclusion of the Core Values into every employee’s annual performance appraisal, weighted evenly with the rest of their functional competencies. This shift required dedicated communication with all employees and training for supervisors and managers. In recognition of the fact that an organization’s “actual values,” as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted or let go, the TCPUD made concerted efforts to demonstrate and model the commitment to the values through these practices. Over time, these efforts have become ingrained in our culture and have built an environment of trust with employees that we are genuinely committed to living by these values.

Benefits and Lessons Learned

Implementing a values-based organizational culture can yield tangible benefits over time. We have noted positive impacts on employee morale, customer satisfaction, and overall organizational performance.

Wherever your organization is in the process of defining its culture, understanding the challenges to implementation of a values-based organizational culture and the benefits it can provide in creating alignment, improving employee engagement and retention and recruitment is worth exploring.

Tahoe City Public Utility District’s Core Values document can be found at www.tcpud.org/about.

Join this session “Leading a Values-Based Organizational Culture” at the CSDA Annual Conference & Exhibitor Showcase!

Steady as you go.

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