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PRINCIPLE ONE: Government Must Always Strive to Provide the Highest Quality Services to the Public

The social contract is built on a simple premise: people pay taxes and expect quality services in return. People are willing to pay taxes if they believe their hard-earned money is being spent wisely and efficiently on quality public services. To maintain the social contract, government must constantly strive to improve quality, eliminate waste and address the changing needs of the public. Failure to do so will erode public confidence in government and increase pressure to cut services across-the-board.

The question is how to build continuous quality improvement into government service delivery. The old way of adding management layers has not worked. Rather than controlling quality, layer upon layer of management as stifled innovation and service delivery. The new system must be closer to the public. Because front-line workers deal with the public very day and understand what people want and need, they must be empowered to meet those needs.

At Saturn, for example, the union almost called a strike because management wanted to put out a line of cars the workers thought did not meet Saturn's quality standard. It would not have been a strike over wages or health care, but over quality. The workers won, no strike was called-and the cars were praised.

Also inhibiting quality improvement is the rigid compartmentalization of jobs. Workers are capable of performing a variety of tasks; rather than limiting them through narrow job descriptions, they should be encouraged and trained to assume greater responsibility for service delivery. It is difficult to improve quality, increase efficiency and stretch tax dollars if workers are not allowed to perform to their potential and cannot address the public's needs without first obtaining permission from a supervisor.

In Portland, Maine, the Department of Parks and Public Works has successfully followed this formula for improving public services. Working with the union, the department established a labor-management committee. Front-line workers were encouraged to submit cost-saving ideas, and instead of the compartmentalized jobs of old, each worker performed a greater variety of tasks and was allowed more versatility on the job. Innovations and increased efficiency followed. Most notable: a sidewalk reconstruction job that otherwise would have been contracted out was given to the sewer department, which did the work for $5,000 less than the contractor would have charged despite a 30 percent increase in the scale of the project.

Ohio's Quality Services through Partnership (QStP) program offers another example of the way worker empowerment benefits the public. Purchase orders that used to take 28 days now take five. Because of better care and maintenance procedures, dump trucks that were once mothballed after 11 years are now expected to last 15. In agencies that have instituted the QStP program, duplicate systems are being consolidated, backlogs are being reduced, and processing times are being cut.

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