Public Employees: Partners for Change

The old command-and-control management style is exemplified by a foreman in a field office of Ohio's Department of Transportation, as characterized by Governing Magazine:

At the beginning of the day's shift, the supervisor writes up a list of equipment and material to put in the truck, rather than letting his men figure out for themselves what they'll need to complete the day's jobs. What the supervisor doesn't want is any lip, so none of the crew members dare correct him if he has left something important off. If he does forget a crucial item, the crew simply sits all day at the worksite, idle.

That this is less the exception than the rule is illustrated by management's frequent insistence on writing stringent "management rights" language into collective bargaining agreements. The agreement with the University of California system lists 21 areas of management rights covering almost two pages, and then states: "the above enumeration of management's rights is not inclusive." In the contract with Columbus, Ohio, the city "retains the sole and exclusive right to determine, create, maintain, expand, reduce, alter or abolish the means, methods, materials, processes, procedures, products, tools, equipment ... location of work, or other operation."

Contrast this with an alternative vision as described in another issue of Governing Magazine-a vision of how tomorrow's public sector is already working today. In Milwaukee, the county's fleet maintenance division decided that the best way to serve the public and repair county vehicles was to redesign the workplace. The division instituted a Total Quality Management (TQM) program that flattened the bureaucracy, sought union input and gave front-line workers more authority to carry out their jobs. The result, according to Governing:

... the backlog of vehicles scheduled for routine maintenance reduced from 350 to none, and the number of grievances filed by unionized maintenance workers is now far lower than before TQM.... 
TQM project teams have streamlined the whole operation of the vehicle maintenance shop, saving the county hundreds of thousands of dollars, both in cash outlays and in equipment down-time. More noticeable at once, however, are some of the smaller things that have happened around the shop because there is now an open line between labor and management. The walls were painted to improve the light in the sheds. When a mechanic needs a tool, he gets the tool, not questions about why he needs it. ...

With the change in management's attitude, the mechanics have been pitching in on projects from cleaning up forgotten corners of the building to conducting an inventory of the once hopelessly disorganized parts department.

Madison, Wisconsin, also instituted a TQM program in several departments which has reduced costs and raised employee morale. In Ohio, the state and the union recently agreed to write TQM principles into their collective bargaining agreement; already, agencies have reported significant savings, greater productivity, streamlined procedures and more responsive service delivery. After New York City's Bureau of Motor Equipment let front-line workers control the maintenance process, vehicles spent less time in the shop and more time in service.

These examples are too rare, but they prove one thing: government services can and will improve if public officials give front-line workers the opportunity to improve them. Under the old command-and-control model, front-line workers accomplish only what the supervisor deems is appropriate, and must obtain approval for even the smallest of tasks. Under the new partnership model, front-line workers are given sufficient leeway to complete tasks, solve problems on site, and adapt the service delivery to the special circumstances of a job. They become an integral part of the team, empowered to explore solutions that their experience teaches them would work. As one public employee put it, the new model offers "top-down leadership with bottom-up participation." The clear winner is the public.

In Government as a High Performance Employer, the 1992 report of the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), the United States Department of Labor emphasized that the future workplace will succeed only by treating front-line workers as resources and partners.

As the report put it, the most competitive private sector companies are abandoning the old hierarchical and rigid workplace in favor of one that "utilizes decentralized and trimmed management structures, relying on workers who can analyze and act on new situations quickly and effectively. They place a premium on moving decisions closer to the front lines, treating their workforce as an investment to be developed, not a cost to be controlled." It is "imperative," the report said, that the public sector embrace this message. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, too few jurisdictions have done so.