Workforce Inclusivity
Staff with whom your clients work most regularly are often informing leadership the least
I directly help executive leaders, separated and often remote from those directly in touch with their clients, gain confidence, cultural unity, and performance advances, by leveraging insights drawn from within an inspired client-facing workforce to maximize outcomes and transform the work environment.
Start by Acknowledging the Gap and Unifying Insight Sourcing
Reducing the gap requires a welcome shift in cultural behavior
The most significant barrier to cultural business transformation is change especially when there are information sharing gaps between leadership and front-line personnel. Such organizational structures require a significant amount of trust, which can easily be severed when leadership directives break down due to lack of established unity or misalignment with service delivery personnel experiences.
Realize when leadership doesn’t listen to client-facing personnel, they may begin to stop listening to you, making change adoption more difficult due to untrusted resistant behavior. Alternatively you can immerse front-line professionals in helping transform the business leading to a stronger partnership built on trust. You establish a thoughtful, collaborative approach to your business and reap tangible measurable and quantifiable benefits including turnover reduction, job satisfaction and performance increases.
New insights will inform decision making and affect your entire business economy
If your culture is suffering from fatigue, distrust, or communication barriers, then it’s likely those deficiencies are mere symptoms of a much larger problem. And the next strategic plan or program initiative which hasn’t been informed by the voice of front-line client-facing staff, is going to reinforce the deficiencies that already exist, and/or create divisive maneuvers across the business to resist leadership's intended strategy. Data analytics might say otherwise, but unless the approach is informed properly, you risk unpredictable outcomes including risk of economic performance and productivity loss. Instead, your service delivery economy can reap the benefits of front-line knowledge, which can lead to immeasurable benefit to you and the clients you serve.
Public sector entities possess unique value-gaining opportunities
If you are a public sector entity, you are immersed in the complexities of political legislation, budgets, and measurements focused passionately on servicing the residents of your community, the same people that likely hold you accountable. And on a daily basis who is most notably engaging with these constituents? Your front-line staff.
I know that empowerment is a critical “cause” that leads to the desired transformation “effect”. I've seen the impact empowering front-line staff has on informing leadership in prior workshops and can attest to its power and value proposition.
Imagine the political equity made possible by simply completing the value-chain linkages between political leadership, constituent, and government workforce. It’s an impeccable trifecta that coincides with the resulting shift in engagement, empowerment, and informed decision making. In essence, the unity and inclusivity you establish, becomes a pipeline of new ideas, transformations, and enhanced service delivery opportunities. And it inspires the system, strengthens leadership admiration, creates a more resilient workforce, with the result that constituent needs are more acutely captured and serviced leading to a more well-aligned government-to-constituent service model.
EMPOWERMENT
Everyone wants to feel like they are contributing to the direction and vision of the business. Those considered your "front-line" or "constituent-facing" are especially interested and notably well informed of client habits, sentiment and trends. Front-line personnel aren't just the face of government service delivery. They listen to your clients. They also observe the caveats, holes, gaps, anomalies, and unique organizational impacts "in the trenches". Ultimately, they maintain rich unique insights that can help inform leadership when enabled to do so.
Systemically speaking, your post-covid workforce has grown further distanced from leadership due to work displacement, yet they continue to engage directly with constituents - nothing new there. What can you do to leverage their insights, capture their ideas, and transform government service delivery?
TRANSFORMATION
Many knowledge workers left the public sector workforce during Covid, leaving government agencies even more resource constrained, accentuating the need for leadership to embrace front-line workers to understand deficiencies that have taken hold (reactively) or transformations necessary to stabilize operations (proactively). The voice of the front-line professional is therefore redefining informed decision making that long has depended upon analytics, data reporting, and quality controls. Unfortunately, these data sets lack critical insights from front-line knowledge workers leaving leadership without true insights into service delivery experiences (both client and service delivery personnel).
Empower your workforce with voice. The outcome will astound you.