Multiple local governments will benefit from the tale of New York City’s innovative staffing dashboard, which tracks the difference between authorized budgeted positions and actual headcounts in 80 agencies.

 The dashboard, which was first developed in 2022, is updated monthly with real-time preliminary data that helps the New York City Comptroller’s office, under the leadership of Comptroller Brad Lander, keep track of vacancy rates. In conjunction with the Comptroller’s NYC Government Performance Dashboard, it identifies instances when understaffing issues are affecting agency performance – an issue that frequently crops up in performance audits in cities, counties and states around the country

A December 2024 case study about the NYC Agency Staffing Dashboard, provides  insights into how it was developed, the data problems that needed to be solved to make it work, and how automatic updating each month allows managers in the comptroller’s office and individual agencies to see frequently updated real-time information that was not previously available.

The case study, “Workforce Data in Action” spells out a number of benefits. As it reports, “the dashboard empowers city leaders to identify issues and take action.” By providing “unprecedented insight into NYC’s public sector workforce,” it skillfully uses data to spotlight and potentially prevent declines in service delivery when agency staffing levels fall short.

For example, in conjunction with turnover information, the dashboard enabled the Comptroller’s Office to see the connection between staffing issues at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development with delays in the production of affordable housing. That resulted in Comptroller office recommendations for better staff development and training.

Perhaps the most useful part of the case study is its description of how the comptroller’s office addressed problems caused by disparate data system, with authorized headcount data and actual headcount data held by different agencies, using different data structures and released at separate intervals.  By successfully merging and cleaning the data, the comptroller’s office was able to provide automatic updates on a monthly basis, cutting dashboard maintenance time to about two hours of work a month.

The case study, which was put together by Work for America and 5Boro, a think tank that focuses on finding creative solutions to NYC problems, emphasizes that the dashboard is transparent, user-friendly and accessible. Benefits accrue not just to oversight agencies or city leaders, but to managers in agencies, which sometimes had trouble previously in getting access to their own workforce data. (Information in the dashboard goes back to 2017.) 

The case study notes that there are still challenges to overcome. For example, the staffing dashboard does not yet include part-time or contract workers. The difference in titles and other definitional issues in 80 agencies also makes it difficult to compare staffing issues for different job categories. In addition, the dashboard isn’t able yet to provide retention information. It can deliver data on changing headcounts, but that doesn’t reveal “churn” – how many employees leave or join in specific periods.

These challenges highlight the need for more advances to come, along with a “broader effort to improve public sector hiring data.”. 

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