Responding to the Great Resignation – How to Optimize Your Organization in a Challenging Labor Market

The pandemic adversely impacted employment in many sectors, including state and local governments. This decline in public sector employment is taking place while state and local governments are also adding expansive pandemic responsive programming, planning for new infrastructure, and addressing evident public needs.

Organizational structure plays a large role in an organization’s overall efficiency. Conducting an organizational assessment to evaluate that structure can offer clarity around operational elements that are redundant or poorly positioned to execute critical functions. Utilizing a structured framework, an organizational assessment identifies opportunities for enhanced alignment and advancement of strategic goals.

The nexus for organizational assessment can vary based on the organization and its needs:

Identifying and Meeting Goals and Objectives  

If an organization is not meeting its objectives, an organizational assessment can pinpoint the causes, such as inadequately trained personnel, faulty internal controls, gaps in processes, or poor span of control.  By engaging a consultant for an unbiased perspective, leadership can identify the best corrective actions to improve resource alignment with organizational goals.

Addressing Negative Feedback

An organizational assessment may also prove instrumental when feedback and comments from constituents and stakeholders are negative. This allows leaders to focus in on the root causes of failure to meet expectations through examination of business processes, systems, or stakeholder interactions that may be the cause of frustration for constituents and stakeholders.

Supporting Transitions   

The Great Resignation is resulting in new leadership often hired from outside the agency. A change in leadership provides an optimal time for conducting an organizational assessment. Newly installed executives can gain a comprehensive understanding of the organization’s current performance, while identifying the organization’s accomplishments and opportunities for improvement.

Listening to Employees  

An organizational assessment can be a “flashlight” that illuminates the needs for change while simultaneously providing insight on employee engagement. Employees are a valuable source of information. Gaining an understanding of how they feel about the organization and listening to their recommendations are key ingredients to developing successful strategies for improvement. Structured feedback from employees that is analyzed and benchmarked can provide leaders with critical insights on day-to-day operations which are often obscured from their vantage point.  Sharing the results of the assessment can provide leaders and employees a sense of a fresh start or rededication to the mission/vision.  This can also help boost morale as employees appreciate seeing their thoughts, ideas and concerns be acted upon. When employees feel that their input is valued, they become more committed to the mission.

Organizational assessments offer a “roadmap“ for improvement by affording the opportunity to change the paradigm and establish a new baseline for success through the development of benchmarks and KPI’s. By measuring impact, leaders can evaluate if the organization is running efficiently and effectively while ensuring accountability. Bronner’s organizational assessment model has helped an array of government agencies with impartial, empirical, and honest evaluations that allow leaders to transform their organizations. Contact Bronner to see how our insights help to strategically optimize the public sector.

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