The Future of Work Civic Innovation in the New Economy

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.

It’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 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

“BEING KNOWN AS A PLACE WHERE TALENT LIVES, THRIVES, AND WANTS TO BE… THE TALENTED WORKFORCE OF THE FUTURE IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF THE NEW ECONOMY.”

enlisting the entire organization in this concept and idea of continuous improvement.

How do we do this practically? The City of Carlsbad had an almost ready-to-go remote work policy. As we looked at the private sector and the opportunities around a more flexible workforce, we saw the logic made sense—from a financial and a talent attraction standpoint. Yet it was stuck in the analysis paralysis because the change management aspects were massive. What happened? We had to shift 60% of our workforce immediately to remote work.

Fortunately, with our investment in communications technology and software, we shifted to remote work without any loss in productivity. And having the workforce, the management and executive teams, and elected officials see this could work, we were able to get our long-term remote work policy put into place.

You can take that on a smaller scale, too. What is the challenge your workforce is facing? What areas do you see opportunities but can never get over the finish line? What are some new and different ways of adapting to the new nature of work? How can you demonstrate those changes and shifts work and can be used to inform a broader-scale application. And it’s the same thing we do in product development in the innovation space. But now the product is people and the nature of their work.

One important thing to our city manager was that remote work was a privilege, not a right, and that is driving our employees to do better. It is also crucial as you’re moving to remote work to have clear KPIs, performance management tools, and ways of tracking progress. These things will allow for a more sustainable shift to remote work.

Now I mentioned the new economy associated with this because many of these challenges are on the public sector side. If you are in the private sector, really key in on areas you can help cities better understand performance. Think about previous metrics when it came to management: One of the most important tools was the walkingaround manager. But we know that the worst productivity measure is seeing butts in seats.

Now, the human aspect of connecting with people and interacting is very valuable. Blending the idea of the walking-around manager and those human connections and creative mashups that occur with performance measures, metrics, and software tools is ideal.

All of this does ultimately relate to the economic development department. We recognize if we aren’t going to fall behind as public sector organizations, we have to adopt and adapt to the new way talent wants to work. It’s not about snacks and slides in your cool Facebook office. It is about performance, value, and feedback and also recognizing we have folks in the workforce we’re trying to attract that aren’t going to stay with us long-term. They’re not investing in your pension system. How do you create an accelerated path for them?

Everybody is competing for talent. Carlsbad launched the Life in Action Campaign, where we are funding a talent attraction campaign not just for the city but for companies, global headquarters, and other software and design firms. These are some of the talent tools necessary to deal with the innovation economy and a more resilient approach. Throwing money at companies doesn’t matter. Free land and tax incentives will not land you the companies you want for a sustainable economy. But being known as a place where talent lives, thrives, and wants to be… the talented workforce of the future is the lifeblood of the new economy. And as it relates to the long-term sustainability of your city, talent attraction and economic development go hand in hand.

This is our opportunity. We are building toward a better future, listening to the people in our organizations and the people we serve and collectively coming up with a new normal, looking over the horizon and saying, yes, we can be something bigger, better, and more agile.

David Graham

Chief Innovation Officer, City of Carlsbad

Carlsbad, California

A veteran local government advisor, David Graham serves on Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s Executive Leadership team as DCOO for the Office of Neighborhood Services. His work includes the first all-electric car-share fleet in North America, an open-data platform for development permitting, a partnership with GE to deploy sensors in LED-enabled smart streetlights, and using technology to achieve municipal climate change goals. He co-chairs Utilities Advancing Cities, is a Cleantech San Diego board member, serves as an advisor to Smart Cities Connect, and is a regular speaker regarding the municipal perspective on civic innovation.