In episode 67, we discuss Kansas City, MO Chief Analytics Officer Kate Bender's insights on how surveys and data can help drive internal culture change and promote retention.
Kate Bender, Chief Analytics Officer for Kansas City, MO joins the Govlaunch podcast to talk about staff engagement, an increasingly important and timely topic as organizations navigate a return to work and high turnover. We'll learn how survey tools and data is helping drive internal culture change and promote retention.
Featured government: City of Kansas City, Missouri
Episode guests: Kate Bender, Chief Analytics Officer for Kansas City, Missouri
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Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the wiki for local government innovation. And on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, I meet with Kate Bender, Chief Analytics Officer for the city of Kansas city, Missouri. We'll talk about staff engagement, an increasingly important and timely topic as organizations navigate return to work and high turnover. Let's now turn to Kate and find out how data is helping drive engagement with their community and staff alike in Kansas city. Thanks so much for joining me today, Kate. Let's start by having you introduce yourself and what you do for Kansas city.
Kate: (00:53)
Sure. My name is Kate Bender. I'm with Data KC, which is, uh, the city of Kansas City, Missouri's data office. So I lead up that team in the city's efforts in supporting data driven management for the city and the community. And I'm excited to be here today. Thanks for having me.
Lindsay: (01:08
Yeah. Super excited to have you, uh, you've been with Kansas city since 2007. Can you speak to how data leadership has evolved during this time?
Kate: (01:17)
Yeah, I mean, in some ways I think our journey in data driven management sort of parallels the evolution of data driven management in the field of local government and the public sector. Early on, when we launched what became the Data KC office we had a city manager and then subsequently a mayor who really championed data as being kind of a central policy initiative. So the mayor ran on a platform of, I wanna have a stat program. This was just a few years after city stat had become kind of a little bit of a, I don't wanna say household name, but in a local government world, a household name. And so he really wanted a, a program like that. Fast forward to, uh, what work cities and other kind of best practice initiatives that started to come out in the teams. There was a lot of support for development that we certainly availed ourselves of and really grew our program accordingly. And now I think you get to a point now, um, you in, you know, 2022 where data has become part of doing our operations right on a day to day basis. So it is still something, our leadership is championing, but it's not a set aside initiative or a policy endeavor so much as something that is in the background supporting lots of other policy and initiatives.
Lindsay: (02:33)
Right. And Data Kansas city is not a massive team. Talk a little bit about the structure.
Kate: (02:38)
Yeah, you're absolutely right. We started off as a very small team, a team of one. We didn't even call ourselves an office per se, cuz I kind of thought could one person be in office really? But uh, we grew to a team of two and then three. And, uh, that really was for our first several years. At our kind of largest, we were at a team of, um, six analysts and administrative support on top of that. That was right before the pandemic. And so we actually have had to scale back a little bit, lost a couple of the positions we had added on, um, just dealing with budget short falls and all of the kind of post pandemic issues. And then of course hiring is still a challenge. So right now we are a team of five. So,we have been able to sort of flex in terms of size. I think honestly this is a really solid, we can do a lot with, with the group that we have.
Lindsay: (03:28)
Well, since 2007, you've been with Kansas City. So it's a little bit of time you've been involved in quite a few initiatives, I would assume. Of all of these initiatives you've been involved with, is there one you're particularly proud of?
Kate: (03:41)
I think for me the one that's sort of closest to my heart and the one that yeah. Brings me the most sort of per personal sense of pride and accomplishment is our, our work that's still growing and developing in supporting employee engagement. And I think it's because it feels like a lot of the work in change and innovation is constantly peeling apart layers, right? Like what's below that what's below. How do we try to get to the core issue here, the core problem or core solution. And it feels like employee engagement. It's not the core issue. There are lots of interrelated things going on in local governments, but it's one of them. Right. And so it felt really, like a huge milestone for us when we started to define like, what are our key employee engagement issues? And what's a path forward in addressing that. And it's such a massive set of things that, you know, I'm not gonna claim we have our arms around it, but it felt like a big step forward in starting to define it and starting to think about a path forward.
Lindsay: (04:43)
Let's have you talk specifically about what projects you are working on specifically related to staff engagement?
Kate: (04:50)
Yeah. We have been doing an employee survey since 2012. We have done a lot of survey work, which I know we're gonna talk about throughout this conversation, but we've, we've obviously gathered a lot of input from external customers, right about services the city provides, but we sort of had a realization that, we have all these internal customers, we have organization of 4,000, over 4,000 employees who every day are using our services like HR, IT, finance, um, and there were wasn't much in place to systematically understand how they felt about those service areas. And so we launched our initial survey really as kind of a customer survey to say, how do you feel about these things? What would you like to see improved? After doing that for a couple years, we realized that we got a lot of useful input from that, right?
Kate: (05:36)
It actually validated a lot of anecdotal data, about people saying, oh, I having problems hiring or I'm having problems with my fleet. Like we were able to kind of distill that down into what are the truly, the key issues that are existing across the organization. But we also were seeing all these things creep out that we were like, wait, these things aren't really owned by anyone. In fact, we don't even know who to assign these to per se, cuz it was things about morale. It was about work environment recognition. So that was what drove us to actually do an employee engagement survey. And we did it, we did like a soup to nuts process. We sat down, we get gathered surveys from elsewhere. Um, you know, had a cross-departmental stakeholder group that reviewed them. And we even brought in public private sector partners in Kansas city who have a lot of experience doing this and asked for their input, what does your survey look like?
Kate: (06:25)
And then we kind of piece stars together based on what we thought were good questions. And then what we thought were important to, to our organization. So that's now we've been doing that survey every other year. Um, and so we've been able to kind of build and understand trends across the organization and in departments. Right before the pandemic we did, uh, took several years of data and put it into an employee engagement and empowerment workshop where we brought together cross departmental leadership to help dig into what are these citywide issues we're finding. Let's try to do some on the spot kind of an analysis and diagnostic to understand, like, what do we think is that the root cause here? And then what can we brainstorm in terms of citywide solutions?
Kate: (07:09)
So I, I think it's really just helped to spark a lot of that cross departmental citywide dialogue, but also actually we have a lot of individual departments that have taken it upon themselves to look at their own data with us and, and say, you know what, I'm really gonna invest in this. And we've seen the returns. That's the amazing thing. We have departments that have put in place new recognition programs or new professional development efforts, and then seeing the impact of that in their next survey.
Lindsay (07:37)
I'm curious to learn what tool or tools you all are using for this survey.
Kate: (07:41)
Yeah. So, we work with, uh, survey contractor since we do other surveys as well. So that was an easy kind of add on for us to say, we'd like to start administering an internal survey to our staff. I think it's very having done this now for a number of years, it's really feasible to run an employee se survey totally on your own using your own tools. If you have a little bit of, support or skill set and develop the questions and then the analysis, but the actual process, especially if you have a lot of office based staff or you have the technology resources in the field to put a, a survey on the computer, a lot of the tools you know, survey monkey or, even Microsoft forms or Google forms are really sophisticated in enough survey instruments that you can use those to gather the input.
Kate: (08:29)
Because our feeling with an employee survey, we didn't wanna sample our employees. We wanted to give every employee the chance to give their input. So we're reaching out to everyone. For us we don't have great technology resources and our employees are very spread out. So we do with work with our contractor to do, quite a few paper copies. We have a process for distributing those and those get mailed back and they are entering in the results. So that's something that I'm, I'm happy to contract out. Like, you know, I think dealing with the mailing and then the, the like entry that's that's takes some, some staff hours, for sure. But on the whole, it's not a super high tech thing. It's kind of what you see in most other type of surveys, which is collecting it and then analyzing it in the back end.
Lindsay: (09:13)
With this employee engagement survey now that we've transitioned to 100% remote work and now governments are trying to bring people back in. Talk to us about the biggest issues that you see with, you know, transition to remote work, bringing people back to the office and, and how you all are really navigating that in Kansas City.
Kate: (09:31)
Yeah, yeah. That has been such an amazing whirlwind. And also just kind of fascinating, honestly, to sit back and try to observe that from a little bit of distance, like, because it was such, it was such a crazy phenomenon that didn't exist, especially in local government, um, to, and certainly not our local government. So we played a pretty big role in supporting our initial emergency telework program, which is what it was called. So doing setting up kind of a quick registration and monitoring. And then we did a series actually of surveys focused on our teleworking population specifically. So this was outside of our normal annual survey. This was us sending them a survey every couple weeks, it was the same set of questions, but then we would also add on things as they, so at the beginning, we were really trying to understand concrete stuff about, do you have the technology you need?
Kate: (10:21)
Where are you lacking? You know, in terms of training or in terms of tools. And we were actually able to kind of then take that and go back and say, wow, we need to have a need for headphones. We have a need for information about how to use some of these video conferencing tools. I will say we were really fortunate that we had a lot of technology infrastructure set up in terms of our software programs and systems. But it's only helpful to the extent that people understand how to use it, I mean, at the beginning we'd had Microsoft teams probably for a couple years, almost no one used it pre pandemic, cuz no one really understood what it was for. And we'd have, we had to cut a lot in our technology training budget. So we didn't have a very robust training system in place.
Kate: (11:00)
And so it was like a crash course. And what do you use this for and how is it function? So we tried to of fill the gap there. So I will say fast forward, we kind of dealt with the same tension and challenges in the evolution of the pandemic where we just had now at this point, so many it's getting better. I know it's getting worse. Again, it it's getting better. It's getting worse again. And that's kind of gone hand in hand with, um, are we bringing people back? Are we not bringing people back? Are we going to hybrids? We've kind of gone through the whole evolution as I think most organizations have of even setting out dates and saying everyone's back at this point. Well, nevermind. Well actually we're doing department by department one.
Kate: (11:37)
One important thing that we have have done that actually started right during that initial phase was we started working on a permanent telework policy because I think one of the things that our surveys identified was that even in the midst of pandemic, even with people who had their spouse in the other room and maybe a couple kids and it was not normal, right, that was something we tried to emphasize. This isn't normal telework, you know, the conditions people are in, plus the, just anxiety nobody wanting to leave their house during the lockdown. But at the same time people liked it. Like they were happy. People felt like, wow, this is, I can do this and I'm more productive. And I would say more than three quarters of our employees had a positive experience, even given that context of the pandemic.
Kate: (12:17)
And so that conversation about permanent telework policy kind of started right away. It's quite a while to gather input to put it together, but it officially rolled out fall of 2021.I see the same tension in, we have a policy now we have systems to support it, but now we're dealing a little bit with those cultural issues that we had never had a chance to fully address because we didn't have an internal culture supporting telework. I think there were a lot of our leader that sort of instinctively thought it was kind of an anathema to know local government is a personal available, you know, we are there for everyone. We are in person. We're there when no one else is there. We have to be present for our customers.And so we have had some departments that have very much shifted their mode of operations so that they have a lot more flexibility in how they provide them and that's helped.
Kate (13:08)
But there are other, uh, areas where, yeah, that I think that cultural feeling of where are we supposed to be and what are we supposed to be doing is holding us back a little bit. But I, I think we'll get there.I think it's inevitable. Local, government's all going to have to adjust to this reality for retention and attraction. I just think it's gonna become enough of an expectation, um, in the workforce at large, that there's not, and there's not enough justification for local government to say, we don't do this because fact is, is most of our work, much of our work can be done remotely and effectively. And then you also add in, and this is something our, our council's been talking about over the last year, just the related financial implications of office space, right. Particularly in cities that where that's at a premium, it's hard to justify investing in office space if you have the opportunity to have your employees work from home,
Lindsay: (14:00)
Right? Well, certainly the future of remote work or hybrid remote work in local government is gonna be really interesting. Do you have some other areas of focus projects you're working on right now that you wanna talk about?
Kate: (14:14)
Yes. So, uh, one thing that our office does. I wouldn't say it's the most forward facing and brightest and shiniest thing we do, but it, it ends up being a, a, a fair amount of work. And I think it's really valuable is trying to support the organization in the tools that we're using. And that means in some cases it's pretty concrete, Hey, we're the contract manager on, you know, this software platform. And so we're helping set up users, we're helping set up training, but more often than that, it's actually sort of scanning the environment to either identify, Hey, these are tools that we need that we don't have, or these are tools we have, and we're not using adequately. So scanning for new tools that's, you know, kind of in the technology procurement area, most places have some sort of process around that.
Kate: (15:01)
And so in that we're mostly, helping to facilitate demos and conversations and, and kind of trying to do that needs assessment. But I think what's more interesting is, is to look at kind of existing tools, kind of goes back to what I said about even just something like teams, right? The Microsoft teams product, which is a video conferencing, chat, um, collaboration tool. And I think if we have this right, we have it in place. It's accessible to all of our employees. We're already paying for it. If we can increase and improve the use of that, t's a tool that can improve the work product for most employees. And so one thing we are really trying to lean into is, improving staff's accessibility to mapping and spatial analysis, uh, tools.
Kate: (15:49)
Mapping, I could go ahead and go off on a whole tangent on this, but it's mapping is something that if you go back 20 years ago, maybe even less was very much like a specialty. And it still is. There are people who are GIS specialists, that is what they train for. But mapping is much more accessible now it's something that you really shouldn't have to be dependent on someone to just make a basic map. We've done a lot of training on data analysis for our staff and mapping is kind of a different beast. You, you have to kind of approach it in a different way, and then it has a different set of tools associated with it. So we're working with both kind of our internal stakeholder group, you know, external vendors, and then trying to like, again, scan the environment and understand what are the needs here and how can we try to organize to meet them.
Lindsay: (16:35)
Yeah. Interesting. You mentioned your involvement in essentially vendor management and making sure that at whatever tools you are paying for that you're fully leveraging all the functionality that you are paying for. I hear this a lot. We work with a lot of companies in this space too. Local governments will say, like, I got this problem and I can't solve for this problem. Like, well, aren't you guys using this tool? And they're like, yeah, yeah, we're signed on with them. They have this feature. Have you guys looked into that? Oh, I didn't know they had this feature. I mean, we even have this issue internally in our company. Right. I think everybody does. So having a dedicated team looking at like, okay, what is the full feature style? What are we paying for? And how are we leveraging these tools? I think that's a super important role.
Kate: (17:16)
Yeah. I mean, you know, won't, won't name names, cuz we're still kind of in this conversation, but we have a vendor who, I just, I felt like we had been down this path. We weren't making good use of this tool. I feel like we had tried honestly. And it just, it wasn't a good match. And so my instinct was let's pull away, let's go in a different direction. We've got other things. We can fill the space. But when we started started the conversation with them, it turned into actually sort of more of a collaborative conversation of, of them saying, Hey, that's a really exciting direction for us. We are trying to lean in, how would you be about partnering in a, you know, redefining our scope to really hone in on that tool and putting a lot of energy around that. And you know, that just, I was like, wow, oh, that's a totally different conversation. Right. I think that that is something we really could make good use of and would extend our capabilities. And, and so, yeah, I think you have to, you have to maintain, you know, ethical boundaries and contractual systems and, there's a level of professionalism in dealing with local government, it in any government and dealing with vendors,
Kate: (18:28)
but at the same time, I think you have to treat it as something that there is opportunity to have conversation around the procurement process. And to say, even with existing vendors, we're not looking to change the scope, but you're like, Hey, this isn't working for me. We need better support here or we need, you know, X, Y, Z, what can you do? How can you improve upon this? I think, especially since so many of the vendors in the data and technology space are new and a lot of them are even startups and they're looking to, to grow in parallel with local government. And so I think for them being able to partner with local government on really, um, applied use cases delivers them value as well.
Lindsay: (19:10)
So Kansas city is just shy of half a million people. So a relatively large US city, what advice around data or data leadership would you share with our listeners that would resonate across all roles in governments of really any size?
Kate: (19:26)
Yeah, so, a couple things. One is the rules of thumb that we use in working with data, I think are relevant everywhere. And we sort of distilled them to three, call them three Rs and they are repetition, relevance and resonance. And that means that whatever data you're looking to work with and whatever area you're focusing on, I mean, you have to be working with data that's relevant to the stakeholders. If you're trying to set in place measures or track them that people are like, I don't actually use that. Or I think that's a bad measure or that data's not valid. That's just not gonna go anywhere. So you have to have a pretty honest conversation about that and about what can be measured, right? There's a lot of like when you start off in performance management type efforts, like, oh, here's the measure we should do. And then a year down the line everyone's like, but can we measure that? No, we can actually can't so it should be realistic. The repetition part is putting in place sums sort of cycle. And I would say like, um, it, it can be, your framework can be anything. It can be, it could be an email that comes out on a regular basis. It could be a report. It could be a dashboard, it could be a meeting. All of those things are common frameworks, but the more important thing is that there is a repetition built into it because I think any new initiative, if it doesn't have some sort of repetition built into it, it's just easy. People have enough else going on.
Kate:(20:55)
You know, nobody has a bandwidth, but if you say like, well, we're gonna have a meeting a month or we're gonna this, email's gonna go out once a week and expect everybody to take a look at it that people have to carve out some space for and both time and then like emotional, mental bandwidth space. And then residents is actually making the data useful for people the story part of it, right? That's something that's been a continual part of our efforts is, is how to take numbers, which to be honest, are not very attractive to, most people are not intuitive and turn it into information and, um, stories that help support people's existing priorities. That's the surprise part of like, when you start, a lot of people feel like performance and data is something that's done to them, which we've tried to, you know, modify that expectation to it's something we're doing with them.
Kate: (21:46)
And so a lot of the time what we're doing is actually helping a department, uh, craft and deliver their data story that they already have. Right. We don't have enough staff. And because of that, we know that we're inspections are taking too long. Okay. Well, here's a way that we can help you deliver that. And then by the way, does you think that's a pretty good argument for an increase in your budget and all of a sudden then they're like, wait, I like data and performance. This I like, this is, this is my type of thing. Right? So I think those three pieces, and then the other piece, which kind of relates to what I just said is, is meeting people where they are. So aligning your performance or data efforts to where your organization is, what or leadership needs. If you try to build a program that doesn't your leadership isn't really interested in it's not gonna be sustainable. That also relates to the scope, right? For some organizations, I think it is totally overwhelming to think about, oh, developing some big program that monitors all of our operations or, or looks at all of our strategic initiatives.
Kate: (22:51)
That it doesn't have to be that scope. There are a lot of cities that focus on, Hey, this is a strategic effort for this year. For right now, let's put a big focus on, you know, the data and the performance around that. And then that actually can turn into be an internal best practice that you could duplicate elsewhere. On the whole, I think there are existing best practices, but you don't have to pursue them all at once. You, you find the ones that align with where your organization is headed or where you like to go and you start there, you know, you start with the, none of it's low hanging fruit, really. Like, I don't wanna use that term, but start with the things that align best with, and then build from there, build your capacity, but also build your buy-in because that, again, I think it something that it, it can, um, build on itself because when you see, uh, an impact or a return, there's more willingness to go and add on. That has completely been our plan. We never sat down and said in five years, we wanna be here. We are instead looking at our operations every year or two and saying, what's the next direction that we are investing in? Where do we still have gaps? It starts with really gap assessments and then figuring it out. But it, it is constantly being reactive to the environment and finding the opportunities to invest in data and performance.
Lindsay: (24:10)
I like the point you made earlier, make sure that the data that you are trying to get at is very pointed and strategic and that you're not collecting data just for the sake of collecting data. I know being on the receiving end of some of these surveys, you're like, I've, they asked me this question three times in this form, like it's just worded differently who charged here. So, um, really making sure that you have a clear objective and that you're trying to get to that objective with the least amount of interaction is definitely some great advice. So we love to talk about failure. Maybe we won't call it failure lessons learned, you've been in local government for quite some time. So tell like, what's the biggest lesson you've learned throughout your work, something you wish you knew from the get go.
Kate: (24:54)
Yeah. Um, and I will say as this, isn't totally my answer to this question, but your point about failure, that's actually like, that's a whole other thing for me, where I really wish that we did more to, to highlight and talk about failure in an open way, because I think we spend a lot of time talking about successes and exciting innovations and less about the, the challenges in getting there. So that's, that's one of my personal, like if I could figure out a way to shape that work.
Lindsay: (25:22)
Well I will tell you, Govlaunch has a filter where you can search for project failures. That's awesome. Now people are less enthusiastic about sharing, sharing their failures for obvious reasons. Uh, but we do have controls in place to make sure that if you're gonna share failure, it's only visible to the government community. So that's good. We wanna log in and see, you know, Hey, this one didn't go as planned. Um, there's a few on there.
Kate: (25:46)
That's awesome. So I would say the biggest lesson I've gotten is that the people are the most important part. I'm someone who likes to learn new skills. I love learning new information. I don't think I'd work in data if I didn just inherently love that part of it. And so I think my inclination has always been, oh, in your career, in your path, this is what you have to gain. You have to gain new skill sets. You have to gain new information. Like everyone knows how important institutional knowledge is in local governments. And so I definitely kind of treasure that, but it it's, um, it's working with other people and developing relationships. That's been the most key to growing our work because people are how change happens. Right. I think it's incredibly hard. I'm not saying it doesn't happen all the time, but I think it's incredibly hard to parachute into an organization and make sustainable change.
Kate: (26:40)
Boom. I mean, think it, it, it is much more sustainable and easier to get there. If you have built some of those relationships and have a better understanding of your stakeholders and what the organization needs. So people are the positive in a lot of ways, people are also the negative people can be the barrier, right. And if you don't understand, and the ways in which I've haven't, we all worked on a project where you think the barrier is this thing, and it it's, it turns out it's not really the thing. It's the people who support that thing, that policy, or that process, like it's someone who owns that process. They're the barrier, not the process process is just a thing that somebody created. But if you have somebody standing over, that's like, this is how it has to be done.
Kate: (27:20)
Then they're the person who needs to be moved and that not the process per se. And so, um, but I, but they're not, immovable either, right? Like people are people and, and you can bring them on board. You can build buy-in. Fairly early on, I took a facilitation class, which I wouldn't have said again, was a skillset that I thought was like, you know, next to really concrete things where it's like, I need to learn this software system, or I need to learn this analysis tool. But I think that facilitation class taught me so many things that I didn't even know I had to learn about how to kind of draw out where people are coming from, understand the points of conflict kind, expose them and, and kind of determine a way to go with consensus. Us being in a part of the organization that is constantly looking to drive change and innovation and support both drive and support, we kind of have to be like the water going down the rocks, where you're constantly trying to find the path and the, I mean, the water does it, and doesn't have to think about it. It's fluid dynamics where it's like, I hit a rock, I'm going around it. If you're people you have to say, okay, from this point of this barrier, where do I go? Can I go around it? Can I move it? Can I go in a totally different direction and come back to this later, because this is not going anywhere right now. So understanding the, the people behind these, the, all of this I think is, is totally key. And probably would've been good to know. Good, good lesson up front.
Lindsay: (28:46)
Well, to your point earlier, you have the data though. You have the facts to kind of lead people in the direction that they need to be led. You can remove a lot of the emotion and the politics cuz you've got the data to support why you should be going a certain direction. So, yep. Such great advice, Kate, thank you so much for joining us and on behalf of your team at data Kansas city, and we really look forward to continuing to track all your innovative work.Thanks again for being here.
Kate: (29:10)
Thanks so much for having me. It's been a really fun conversation and appreciate the chance
Lindsay: (29:22)
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcast. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki@golaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.