Engaging Pasco - Bridging Communications Gaps Across the Organization

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

It is no secret that communication is the biggest issue for an organization to tackle. It always has been, and likely always will be in the future. But that does not mean that we should simply toss it in the pile with the rest of the things we can’t really do much about. Employee engagement is dependent on every individual, at every level feeling well informed about current events and knowledgeable about the organization’s mission, why it is important, and what role they play in the overall strategy to achieve it.The formal approach to communicating within most organizations typically includes meetings, news letters, web updates, and more of late, teleconferencing. Our organization deployed all of these methods, taking great care to provide the most important information. And while we believed that we were doing a good job communicating to our team of over 3,000 employees, the data showed that we were not. Results from our annual Employee Engagement survey for 2019 verified that communications from leadership to the frontline teams was still one of our biggest performance gaps. Similarly, data from our internal SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis identified communication as the primary organizational weakness. We were doing what other organizations were doing, what we believed we needed to be doing. Why wasn’t it working? With a goal of being recognized as a Top Workplace based on Employee Engagement survey scores, we had to understand what was behind these results, and make the necessary changes.