INNOVATION & CHANGE
THE FUTURE OF WORK:
CIVIC INNOVATION IN THE NEW ECONOMY BY DAVID GRAHAM
Civic innovation and technology are being applied to talent attraction, culture change, and supporting a resilient economy.
I
t’s undeniable that recent years have disrupted how the public, private, and academic sectors work. But what do we do with the lessons we have learned? How do we apply those lessons to the future of work? How do we gain insight and be innovative in how we continue to work, particularly as it relates to attracting talent for our companies, public institutions, and academic organizations? I’ve worked on both the public and private sides of local governments for about 20 years. And one thing we see is governments are not agile. We’re not known for being fast. In California, you just need to say DMV, and everybody will go, “Ugh.” It seems to be almost a universal truth that the public does not believe the public sector can be agile—or that we can be innovative. And as I think about the future of work and lessons we can apply, I think there are a couple of key areas we need to focus on if we’re going to adapt to civic innovation in the new economy. The challenges we’ve seen are agile management and performance metrics. Key performance indicators and technology tools to measure performance have not been universally adopted in civic institutions and organizations. You sometimes get a newly elected official who brings in their vision of becoming more data-driven, but those longterm investments in strategy and data-driven decision-making wane as new priorities find their way to the surface. So the challenge is one of persuasion but also persistence. We need to use persuasion and convince the workforce of the persistent change as it relates to them. When you engage with employees, setting a top-down strategy for rolling out KPIs and using additional tools, new software to track performance and goals, it has an impact, and they understand how that
28 | Smart City Miami
can affect them and their job for the better. It’s not just about incentivizing; it’s about really changing the nature of work. After the idea begins to soak into the workforce is when we see real and sustainable change. I term this “changing from evangelists to engineers.” You can evangelize and get people excited about something, but until it becomes a part of the core operations of government, you’re going to see skepticism from your workforce. The challenge is the messengers that can foster and accelerate the belief. Of course, you need buy-in at the top, whether that’s your elected level or top administrative official. They need to believe not just that it’s a best practice or something that should be done; they need to consistently communicate and speak about the value of this shift in the nature of work. But it’s not just at the top. The most compelling people are your peers. You need to get a network of those at the peer level to buy into the change in the future of work and begin to foster that by demonstrating that what has occurred is valuable. Those are the people you need to enlist by using strategies like working groups, additional training, or a group of individuals as your cross-departmental innovation team at all levels of the organization. That’s one way to drive change and drive it quicker as it relates to adapting to the nature of data-driven decision-making and work. There also needs to be a virtuous feedback loop where the communication from your employees is understood, responded to, and incorporated into what’s occurring. That doesn’t mean every employee’s idea is great or that you need to be surveying employees every week. But they need to know they are heard, their input has been considered, and, in cases where it makes sense in changing the nature of work, they can see they had an impact. Because ultimately, when you think about
the human side of this, which is sometimes the biggest challenge and opportunity, being valued, knowing that your input is heard and impacting the way work occurs is having some level of long-term sustainability. Those of us in the public sector see our decisions to work in this sector are to impact our community, that there is value beyond the products and services we provide. There are innate human-scale impacts of doing work in and around government. And it’s not just for the pension or the paycheck. It is for people. And that needs to be recognized as you’re trying to help your organization adapt to the future of work. So, what opportunities should we focus on in this particular space? Technology exists to allow for things like remote work, better tracking of progress and performance, and the ability to provide more data to people at all levels. Data analytics and visualization tools are easier than ever. By providing these tools and empowering people to use them, you move from just a small group dedicated to data-driven decisionmaking to infecting an entire organization with a culture of data-driven decision-making. And through that, you can see power and insights you would’ve never expected. For example, in my team, we do things called innovation sprints, where we don’t come up with solutions, we facilitate conversations through journey mapping, storytelling, and various design thinking methods. We connect an internal set of folks familiar with the city with the subject matter experts; we don’t say, “Here’s your problem, and here’s your solution.” We help them discover the opportunities and challenges in the work we’re doing. And here lies the opportunity: Employees are a part of solution creation; they have a voice and participate in that change. It’s
