Recommendation to request City Manager to direct all City of Long Beach employees to participate in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy "State of the Service" public employee survey, to be completed within the next 45 days.
Communication from Council Member Richardson Council woman Mango Vice Mayor Andrew's recommendation to request city manager to direct all city of Long Beach employees to participate in the USC. So Price School of Public Policy, State of the Service Public Employee Survey to be completed within the next 45 days. Thank you. That's. There's a motion. Can I get a second, please, before I turn this over? Most of the second counselor, Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So tonight, I want to take a moment to highlight and focus on our public employees. I've worked with public employees my entire adult life, from my time, you know, student body president, my time working with California faculty, association with professors. And then my time as a worksite organizer for SEIU Local 721, which represented public employees in the county and in the city city of Los Angeles, here in the city of Long Beach. We employ nearly 6000 individuals from all different backgrounds and ages and races. And I personally believe that our public employees, they're our city's greatest asset. They are the the voices of our city. They're the faces of our city, the working hands of our city. And they're constantly our public employees across the country are constantly delayed, deal with attacks and pressing issues about maintaining quality of their service. And while, you know, a lot of times they don't necessarily feel that the receive the respect or the recognition from the public that they should. And so before so over the last decade, we've dealt with a lot of diminished resources. We've dealt with constrained budgets. Now we're finally in a place where we can do restorations and things like that. At the same time, our local governments now have new state mandates and unfunded liabilities and things like that. And so a lot of these challenges consistently contribute to low morale. And so the idea here is, you know, after a conversation at Southern California Association of Government Governments, I became aware that USC's Sol Price of Public Policy has designed a survey entitled State of Service. The the point is to measure key success indicators in the workplace and municipalities across Southern California cost the state of California and it helps to determine what motivates employees to do their job, evaluates levels of satisfaction, learning of the pressures and stresses and challenges of the workforce that they face on a daily basis. It'll help to inform policy changes that will not necessarily within our city, but across the region. It helps us to sort of take really get a snapshot across the region. And so at this point, I want to introduce I want to light up Dr. Bill Rasch, who is associate professor at UC. So price for public policy to share a little bit more about the survey. Thank you very much. Council Member Richardson Members of the Council. Mr. Mayor. Thank you for having me. Mr. West. Mr. PARK. And thank you. So for over two decades, governments at all levels of the US, Australia, several countries in Europe and elsewhere have used large surveys of public sector employees to gauge those employee perceptions and attitudes about their jobs, working conditions, organizational policies, their coworkers, leaders, etc. And these surveys have been designed and implemented to enhance our understanding of how to improve managerial capacity and performance and increase recruitment and retention of talented managers and employees in government. The US Office of Personnel Management for over 15 years has conducted the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to produce survey results that are representative of the entire federal executive branch as well as of employers within individual agencies. Responses to those items concerned. Job satisfaction. Satisfaction with pay. So on and so forth. And agencies regularly use these particular items to identify internal weaknesses and areas for improvement. Now, as you and I have heard this evening, we know that your employees and their skills are and their knowledge are some of the city's most important assets, sometimes more important than other forms of capital, such as physical and financial assets. So the survey that we've designed is to make assessments of the human capital capacity that exists in Long Beach to help you identify areas of particular strength, which I know you have, as well as potential weaknesses both within your own workforce and compared to workforces in neighboring municipalities. So we come to you from the University of Southern California's School of Public Policy. Thank you. With a charge to serve our communities and to provide the resources that we have to you for the purposes of advancing and uplifting the lives of our citizens together. And as a resident of the second District, this is important to me as well. For the purposes of this project sponsored by. The Hands Foundation of Southern California. Our intent is to provide a well-designed instrument that's based on the best survey practices established by research and by various governments who have done something similar to this. And in the past, I myself have consulted the United States Office of Personnel Management on the implementation design of their annual employee census that surveys well over 700,000 survey civilian employees of the U.S. federal government. So in that tradition, we've designed for you a survey that offers unbiased, accurate and informative responses on issues that are critical to effective performance here in the city of Long Beach, but in local governments everywhere. We have worked hard on identifying practically every position, unit and department across your city government, such that anyone taking the survey can find their position in a quick drop down menu. Through countless test runs, we've estimated the survey to take approximately 20 minutes for any respondent. It is mobile optimized. The survey instrument can be done on desktop, laptop or on any subject subject, meaning an employee's cell phone. It is completely anonymous and we work very hard with the standards of our internal review board to maintain the confidentiality of any responded. The City of Long Beach has stated that it seeks a research partner for their Everyone in Economic Inclusion initiative. The research, overseen by this newly established Office of Equity, requires the development of new evaluation frameworks that identify opportunities for social and economic innovation while identifying barriers to economic inclusion for disenfranchized communities. The results of this survey and subsequent interviews that our team will provide should provide some support to the development and implementation of policy interventions and inform the strategic objectives for a longitudinal, longitudinal analysis of equity profiles across the city of Long Beach, especially as they concern employee perceptions of the issue. Community benefits will include programs designed to support minority owned businesses through more equitable policies and human and financial capital investments. Just as importantly, and maybe more importantly, the initial survey, as well as the follow up interviews our team will conduct ask questions about. Your workforce that are widely. Acknowledged as key indicators of success and allow for comparison across departments and with other municipalities in L.A. County. In all, we have had so far over 15 municipalities, including L.A. City, that have already taken the survey. We have agreement from L.A. County Sheriff's Department to proceed soon. And using these results as baseline comparisons, you will be able to make assessments by department, managerial level or other demographics on all key indicators. For instance, we have several job related assessments of employers on all managerial ranks about their level of satisfaction in their jobs, their pay, and their sense of well-being. Among other valuable indicators of morale and work environment. And crucial to this understanding is the level of empowerment employees perceive as they carry out their jobs. Of course, the level of discretion will vary across job responsibilities, but public agencies and private firms increasingly have been relying on participative management techniques and employee empowerment practices aimed at sharing authority , information and resources with frontline employees. Something that I witnessed just tonight in what's happening here in Long Beach. So I do expect positive results from the survey, by the way. But this includes identifying. Limiting unnecessary or burdensome procedures that may be imposed on frontline workers that can many times be imperceptible to management. I give you an example. I will keep. The municipality anonymous at this point. But this is a mid-sized city in Los Angeles County of over 100,000 residents. And when we asked frontline workers and managers how burdensome, burdensome their policies or procedures were within their respective departments, you see quite a difference between those that have less than five reports, to those that have over five reports , those that have over five reports don't perceive the procedures as burdensome, where the frontline workers indeed do. Studies consistently have shown as well that an employee's satisfaction with his or her relationships with other employees and the supervisors that they have is negatively associated with intention to turn over. That is to leave their job. Sorry about the little run on with the text there. It reduces the uncertainty and equivocal ity when you have a good relationship with your supervisor and your peers and it reinforces the workers feelings of identification with the organized. Zation. The trust in the supervisor is also negatively related with that intention to leave. And so having a systematic assessment of this in your own workforce should be critical to building existing capacities as well as identifying ways to strengthen those bonds. As you see again, another example, when trust in leadership is high, this can vary among particular demographics in this particular city. Hispanic employers had far less faith in their performance being judged fairly than non-Hispanic employees. This is something that should be identified by your management and I believe is to an effective stance, except to have systematic evidence of your successes should be something that you should strive for. In my own opinion, management relations, of course, are important as well in terms of gender. And sometimes we have some inequities within our departments or within our organizations. Indirect encounters with the members of the public employees are tasked with producing desired emotions in a member. I mean, with a member of the public, which requires this emotional management and at times performance by the employee that can quite quickly learn lead to emotional burnout. And so in order to conform to the appropriate display that is necessary in emotional management, employees who do not experience the required emotions naturally have to engage in strategies of emotional repression or expression. And these types of emotional labor from repeated customer service encounters have been linked to burnout, which of course can lead to turnover intentions. Here again is a sample of some of the questions in a larger emotional burnout scale that we include asking workers whether they feel emotionally drained, so on and so forth. Finally, and probably most important to your interest, both both from a human capital stance, but also from a fiscal stance. Job turnover is a pressing issue in the public sector, in part because of the serious consequences that it creates for managers and also the cost it carries to taxpayers. In addition to creating turmoil and causing disruptions in service delivery, turnover imposes considerable costs on organizations separation costs such as severance pay, as well as replacement costs, including the cost of hiring, screening and training new employees. The average turnover costs for a full time professional employee have been estimated to be as high as 150% of the employee's annual compensation package. Here again, as this example shows you, the threat is quite real. 31% within this mid-sized city within Los Angeles County and indicated some intent of turnover. Sometimes it's from one department within the city to another, but many times it's to leave the city as a whole. Also, most importantly or not most importantly, but also importantly, we we gauge citizen engagement practices and outcomes from your individual workers, your individual employees to see if we can collect systematic best practices across your city. And of course, the survey has all areas of analysis being broken down by key employee characteristics, such as department, gender, minority status, managerial status, so on and so forth. But we do protect the data to the effect that if there is, let's say, a minority, a single minority within a given unit or department. Of course, we would aggregate the numbers large enough so that no single person could be identified within a given department by their age, whatever characteristic there might be. So of the gender differences, the role differences and the various differences among your diverse employee population, it's, I think, critical for you to make an assessment of where these employees stand in terms of their devotion to the mission of their organizations and the city itself. And so our draft project timeline is a 90 day top line research initiative. We expect to administer the survey over September and October with data analysis coming in November and initial findings and a report coming out sometime in December, followed by a qualitative listening tour that includes conversations with your management to make sure that we are providing the data that they need to make actionable changes if necessary, and others to make sure that they have the information necessary to tout their various achievements. And so with that, as I said, 15 municipalities across L.A. County. Including L.A. City and soon L.A. County Sheriff's Department have already taken this survey. And it's our hope for the continued success of Long Beach that you will join these cities. So thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Resch. And I'll and I'll just say the conversation is going on for a while. And remember, the survey was a lot longer. But in conversations that we want to bring it down, you've done a good job bringing it down to a 20 minute survey. So my knowledge that. But thank you for your presentation. Thank you. Good. And so that said, members, I think this makes sense based on a lot of the conversations we've had at the Council about data and retention and and all those things. And I think a city, you know, the second largest city in the county should participate in this survey that's across Southern California. And, you know, I would love to go back to the gang and say, hey, we brought home the second largest city in the sky region for the survey. But that said, I encourage your support. Thank you. That's me. My interest. I might. I think this is a great partnership. And so I'm really Dr.. Thank you. It's such a rush. Correct. So, Dr. Asha's, thank you for doing this project. I think obviously as a as a graduate of, of C and I, I taught at a price for a couple of years, a couple of courses for that price. I think that the level of work that you're doing with the faculty there is really amazing. And so to have this partnership with the Price School, I think is great. And I think this kind of survey work and and this kind of data and the level of analysis that you're going to do, I think, is really impressive. And so I'm very supportive of this. I want to thank Councilman Richardson and the councilmembers are bringing this forward. And I hope that this will be one of a variety of other projects we could partner in the future. I know that the Price School has some exciting projects with many municipalities. We do have some projects here in Long Beach as well that the preschool partners with and I think this is a the survey work is really great. So thank you for bringing that forward, Councilman Mungo. Thank you. Also, I've served as an adjunct at price and I'm taking some time off to have our our first child. So I'm not there this spring. But I do love the work done at price. As a member who signed on to this item, I think it important that any additional questions that were added that are not part of the standard SKOG survey, that that this body would at least have the opportunity to at least see them. It sounded as though you made some customizations, but I'd hope that they would not be at the request of only one council member. And so I'm happy to arrange a time at your convenience to look at what those look like. And I'm not sure what other city staff have haven't. Had any questions. He mentioned he added additional questions on our part of Skog. I am happy to share with all the council, the mayor's office as well as the city manager. I'm just interested in what adjustments were made, especially having co-taught with city managers and others across the region and actually serving and taking your survey through the L.A. County Sheriff's Department as a deputy sheriff that I serve as, I think it'd be interesting at least to know what customizations you brought forward and where they came from. So the customizations were rather minimal and they were done through a little bit of conversation with Rex Richardson and the staff mostly focused on economic inclusion initiative, but with with an eye on being a Long Beach resident, making sure that it was appropriate to the city itself. But all questions that we use are validated, questions used in previous surveys, and I provide references for any of the given questions as they've been used previously. Well, I look forward to looking at those with you in terms of talking through them, because while Councilmember Richardson's priorities are important to all nine of us, and we want to be sure that we didn't want city staff to be influenced by one councilmember where a policy had not been specifically prioritized over any other policy. So just interested to see that, especially in light of my signed on to such a big supporter of price. I look forward to working with you and thank you. Had we known you were here, we would have tried to move your item up. I didn't see you in the audience tonight, so we apologize for that. Thank you for being a part of our robust budget conversation and many other robust conversations, and thank you for being a long. Time, a professor of governance, management and policy processes. So this is edifying and thank you for the time, so. Thanks for. Being here. We're proud to have you here in. Long Beach, so. Absolutely love that. Councilor Pearce. Yes, I'd like to just say thank you so much for the presentation. Thank you for working with Rex Richardson on this. I did not teach at price, but I did work at Lane for a decade and we work very closely with USC in many of our development projects. And so I don't want to make any changes. Of course, I feel like you guys have a handle on what kind of. Shouldn't you have? I do look forward to seeing the results and then seeing if there's a next phase. I know that I personally am invested in looking at making sure that, especially through our H.R. practices, that people feel like they have a safe space to report any workplace, whether it's violence or abuse or bullying and things, issues like that. And so hopefully we can work together down the road on some projects around that with our H.R. department as well. But really happy to have you here and thanks for staying. Q Councilman Price, thank you. This is a really I didn't know anything about this. I think this is really great. I thank my colleagues for bringing forward and of course, Councilman Richardson for for leading it. I think it's great. I did my master's. I got my masters in public policy. And I did my thesis on citizen satisfaction surveys. And if governments issued those to their residents and I thought it was just so interesting to, you know, really use that survey data to implement it into, you know, practical application. I thought it was great. So I think this is great. And, you know, I'm I'm assuming it's going to be general enough that they all the employees can relate to it and answer it like you've done in other cities, which is great. And I in my other hat, I'm a public employee in Orange County, I'm at the district attorney's office. And I actually think this would I don't know if my boss would agree, but I think this would be a really great idea to do there as well. So maybe we can talk later and I can at least throw the idea out there and see if they'd be interested. But I mean, it's just additional data that you can use to guide your management. And in a world where law enforcement is changing, I think prosecution officers could really benefit from that. So this is great. I really like this agenda item. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Richardson. And Councilman Austin wants to go before I. Speak to in Austin. Hey, thank you very much for the presentation on. I've been kind of multitasking and taking the survey while while you were talking, you said it was going to take 20 minutes. So I figured, you know, it's a good use of my time. And I found that some of the questions to be be very interesting and straightforward. You mentioned earlier and and I read on the the website that that you're going to share the data with organizations like the League of Cities and in other public sector type organizations. Were you there any plan to work with any of the the the the employee organizations that that are out there to just get some real feedback from from from employees that maybe not associated directly with the employer, but because I think there's a real opportunity to to work with some of the public sector labor organizations like Ask Me and SEIU, folks who are public employee specific. So in some of the cities that we've worked with, they we had also consulted Public City, I mean, public employee unions prior to implementing. They were very supportive. We've really had no pushback on this survey from any given city. Good has participated at any rate, and we've had a pretty successful rate so far of those that want to buy in. And so in terms of the data and when you're done and it's all culminate, it will not be shared publicly as well. So it depends what you mean by so in the aggregate, yes. On an individual basis, no. As I said, we're very serious about maintaining the confidentiality and the anonymity of each one of our subjects, to the point that neither a manager nor anyone from the public would be able to identify a single responded by their placement in a department, by any given demographic characteristics such as gender or race or so on and so forth. We take that quite seriously. And we had this study reviewed by our internal review board at USC, which abides by the standards by the national standards of Arabs. That being said, we work with each individual city as to how they would like the data constructed for their own purposes and own internal purposes. And then as well, we are not in the I'm not in the business to try to expose one city compared to another. So when I'm giving you comparative analysis between yourself and neighboring municipalities, as you saw in the slides that I was presenting for some of the examples of the data that we have used, I will not name that given city and to every extent possible obscure, you know, the characteristics of that city to the point that all you'll have, all you'll have is basic demographics. That is, you know, is it over under 100,000 people, so on and so forth. Yeah. To the knowledge. Thank you. Thank you. Just two final things. A one in our motion, we say, requires the city manager to direct all city employees. I want to make sure we're good on on the on any sort of. What is it? We can flourish. You go. Any meat conversions, we're going to say encourage strong participation instead of direct so that we're encouraging this, we're encouraging full participation. But there would be no penalty if someone does not participate in the survey. Yeah, that's one of the things that should be made clear. Also to be clear, the only way that we can provide you good analysis is for it and for us to have robust participation. Thank you. I think we're good at this point. Mr. Roche, you can go ahead and take your seat. But I want to just in my motion to, you know, to make that one change. And the second thing is, I think I just want to sort of explain, when we rolled out the everyone in initiative, one of the first motions was to go out and see if someone could help us with an economic equity study. And that's when sort of the opportunities presented to us that USC has so sold price as some some competitive grants, some innovation grants and things like that. And that sort of led to the conversation of if we don't find the funding for that study, could some of this help contribute to that? That's what the connection was. And so since then, we've identified the funding and policy link, and Chase has contributed $75,000 to conduct this study. But what we got out of the through the process of just exploring our options is an amazing opportunity to participate in this larger, broader survey. So I felt like maybe that helps helps us understand the context and connection that everyone in economic inclusion work. That said, I encourage oh not Chase I'm sorry city community development. So that said I encourage vote. Thank you. Any public comment? Please cast your votes. Pearce motion carries. Item 20, please.