When Kathy Waymire in the Department of Natural Resource and Parks’ Water and Land Resources Division talked to her staff about the One Thing the group would focus on for their action plan, Growth and Development bubbled to the top of the list. Some were interested in improving skills for their current jobs and some were interested in looking down the road at what might come next for them. So, Kathy, eager to do something to support these aspirations now, turned to development plans as a tool to help her staff identify… Read More

Brooke Bascom, Employee Engagement Manager in Executive Services, was recently quoted in a Governing online magazine article, speaking towards using smart management skills. Her quotes reflect the importance of conscious and intentional action to work with employees to create a positive work environment. This is in response to a statement within the King County Employee Engagement Survey that received only 49 percent positive response rate: “My supervisors deal with problems among co-workers effectively.” Brooke explains that King County is working to establish opportunities for managers and supervisors to better address issues when they arise. She… Read More

Jennifer Hills, Director of the Office of Risk Management in the Department of Executive Services, was “devastated” when she looked at the engagement scores for her division. Lower than she expected “I was surprised because we’d been doing a lot of strategic planning and our 2012 employee survey results were so good.” Hills resolved to approach the conversation with her 22 person division with “curiosity and gratitude”: curiosity about the underlying reasons for the scores and gratitude for the opportunity to be able to address concerns. This opened the door for honest communication… Read More

November 30 we started trainings for managers and supervisors on action planning with their workgroups. In the course of the trainings we talk about people’s hopes for how these conversations will go and what will come out of them. There is a lot of hope from our people leaders that this will be the beginning of a new dynamic between managers and supervisors. I have been inspired by the hopes we have heard: This will be an opportunity to build trust with employees The action plan will have an impact Everyone will… Read More

“Asking the right questions takes as much skill as giving the right answers” One of the best tools for having robust discussions about engagement and action planning with work groups is a handful of open ended questions. A good open ended question will engage people in discussion and help you better grasp the state of engagement, what success looks like and the steps needed to get there. We give participants in our trainings space to brainstorm open ended questions they can use in their discussions with work groups and they’ve come up with some… Read More