Last week we wrapped up trainings preparing managers and supervisors to lead their groups in responding to survey results. 498 (let’s call it 500) managers and supervisors participated in this training and still more are taking it online. That’s an incredible grassroots force out there leading culture change by having conversations with their work groups about how to improve engagement in the county.

Evaluations from the trainings (scores are out of 5 where 1 is strongly disagree and 5 is strongly agree) show that:

• People will be able to apply what they’ve learned (4.14)
• They understand why engagement is important to King County (4.28)
• They know how to read their reports (4.23)
• They know how to lead their group in action planning (4.02)

One area we still need to do some work is helping people understand how the county will respond to the survey results (3.82). We’ll be making a big effort to tell the story about how the county is responding in this blog, Town Hall meetings, videos, emails and in communication from the Executive.

Most useful – People found the most useful things about the training interacting with others, discussing biggest fears about having conversations with their work groups and learning to read the reports.

Most applicable – People said the things they learned and will apply in the next 30-60 days are how to have meetings with staff to discuss results, how to share results with staff and Lean Grasp, Plan, Do, Check, Adjust methodology for action planning. This last was particularly rewarding to see because we made an effort to integrate Lean and ESJ into our engagement practice so people could see how they interrelate. In our environment we often feel like there’s a lot coming at us so seeing how it all relates and builds off each other is important.

Improvements – Some people mentioned that they would like to have attended with their departments or divisions which is something we will be looking at for next year.

Take-aways from the trainings were:

• Managers and supervisors are eager to support culture change in the county
• There is a high level of interest in learning from each other so we need to create a lot more opportunities for people to connect

Also interesting is looking at what people said would be most useful to them in their action planning. Resources that are easily accessible online and ways for people to connect and learn from one another are the most popular. This informs what we need to do to next. We’re working on getting these things up and running right now!