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Last summer, we wrote a report for UKG about the increasingly onerous issue of state and local employees who -- for a variety of reasons -- are thoroughly worn out, a situation which can result in a variety of problems, including unplanned and unexplained absences, risks to worker safety, drops in performance, and declining levels of customer satisfaction. You can download the full report by clicking here. The issues of workplace fatigue haven't become any less important since the release of the report. Heightened turnover in recent years, hiring difficulties, stress, and an onslaught of overtime requirements, mean that more and more public sector workers are experiencing its sometimes dangerous consequences. As a result, public sector managers are becoming more attuned to the issue and are looking for ways to address its root causes. "Increasingly, both public and private sector organizations are pinpointing a range of negative impacts on workers who aren’t getting enough rest. . . “If an employee is fatigued, productivity will go down. You have a greater chance of mistakes at work and a greater chance of someone hurting themselves,” says Talona Felix, UKG workforce business consultant. "There’s something of a chicken and egg syndrome here. For individuals who work in 24-7 operations – which include a great many government functions that must run around the clock ‒ fatigue and related burnout increase retention problems, which then puts more pressure on remaining staff. “Every day we would lose more people than we could hire and a lot of it was just because our staff burned out,” says Betsy Thomas, director of human resources at the Georgia Department of Corrections. In exit surveys, held when individuals left their jobs, the department heard two major complaints. One focused on their relationship with supervisors and the other was that they were not able to take enough days off. "Though issues of fatigue are gaining increased and merited attention in recent years, as far back as 2000, Dr. Bryan Vila authored a book called Tired Cops, written under a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. In it, he contended that “police managers and leaders need to develop work-hour standards and procedures to minimize fatigue and ensure alertness, develop and implement thorough fatigue management plans, establish permanent employee/manager fatigue task forces to monitor compliance with related policies and regulations, and identify new problems and opportunities for ensuring officer alertness on the job,” according to a DOJ synopsis. . . "The degree to which people aren’t able to get enough sleep has been increasing. In a nine-year study of self-reports of sleep duration from the National Health Interview Survey, Ball State University analyzed sleep duration for 150,000 working adults and found that the number who got seven hours of sleep or less had increased from 30.9% in 2010 to 35.6% in 2018. "That study found that poor sleep quality was particularly common in a number of professions that are part of the public sector, including healthcare, protective services, and transportation. "Studies of police officers, for example, have shown that a high level of stress makes the fatigue the officers face from other factors even more acute. Problems can be particularly vexing for individual employees whose work hours vastly exceed the norm. "By examining the data, Felix has found extreme examples of employees who work many consecutive days without a break — such as one worker who put in a numbingly high 265 days on the job without a single holiday or weekend off. Though this is certainly extreme, her study of workplace data reveals plentiful instances of public sector employees who work long shifts and come back seven hours later to begin again. “If you only take seven hours between shifts, how do you get enough sleep and then also attend to the other aspects of life — eating, having time with family, sleeping, and hopefully showering?” she asks." #StateandLocalHumanResources #HumanResources #WorkplaceFatigue #StateandLocalGovernment #StateandLocalOvertime #Overtime #StateandLocalData #UKG

Over the last few years, a whole bundle of things that happened in the state and local government world were attributed in some way to the pandemic. To be sure, the devastating impact of COVID has found its way into many corners of our lives. But just because a shift in major societal trends occurred during or after the pandemic, that doesn’t mean that one was the cause of the other, despite what you may read elsewhere. We spoke with Stefaan Verhulst a professor at the NYU Center for Urban Science, and co-founder of the GovLab at NYU, about this. He’s one of the most data-savvy people we’ve ever met, and here’s what he had to say: “"The pandemic is now frequently attributed as the explanation for various trends. It has become a dominant variable in interpretations of contemporary phenomena. However, it's important to consider that observing a spike during the pandemic might indicate a correlation rather than a direct causation.” As many readers of the B&G Report doubtless know, confusing two events that happen simultaneously (correlation) with one event that causes the other (causation) can lead to all sorts of false conclusions. As the extensively published physician Frank Messerli wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine over a decade ago, it’s possible to find a correlation between chocolate consumption by country and the number of Nobel laureates. It seems intuitively clear that Hershey Bars aren’t the key to genius, and he wrote his piece as a caution to scientists about jumping to false conclusions based on correlation data. Here’s a powerful example of this kind of flawed thinking from Verhulst: “Consider remote working,” he said. “If you look at productivity lines, they have been going down for fifty years and it’s been a trend not just because of the remote work that was the result of the pandemic. But there were all kinds of assumptions made despite the fact that there was very little causation between whether people worked remotely or not and their productivity.” This is an easy trap to fall into, and in the years when we worked as consultants to the Pew Charitable Trusts we became accustomed to the careful analysis that went into avoiding confusing correlations with causations. We just wish that others did the same. #stateandlocalmanagement #pandemic #covid #data #StefaanVerhulst #JAMA #NewEnglandJournalofMedicine #causation #correlation #NYU

Periodically, we make a request in the B&G Report for recommendations of books that provide worthy reading for people who are interested in state and local government. We're back again, and are asking readers to send us new nominations. A few months ago, we went through this exercise and published nine of the titles that came in. It’s important to note that we decided not to include books that were suggested by their own authors. While we know many of these authors personally and think their books were worthy of inclusion, it doesn't feel like it is in the spirit of the effort to include books by recommenders who so obviously had a horse in the race. (For example, we didn’t bring up our most recent book, about performance management, and so we’re playing by our own rules). Following are eight titles. We’ve linked them all to Amazon.com for ease of purchase if you’re so moved, but we’d like to encourage you (as much as we use Amazon.com ourselves) to consider patronizing your own local bookstore. We're waiting to hear from you. The Unheavenly City: The Nature and the Future of Our Urban Crisis, by Edward C. Banfield, recommended by BJ Reed, Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska Omaha The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America, by Alan Mallach, recommended by Alan Ehrenhalt, senior editor, Governing The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee, recommended by Alisha Gillis, recommended by Alisha Gillis, senior editor, Route Fifty What Should We Do: A Theory of Civic Life, by Peter Levine, recommended by Karen Garrett, chief of communications, marketing and membership, American Society of Public Administration Speaking Truth to Power: Art and Craft of Policy Analysis, by Aaron Wildavsky, recommended by Dean Michael Mead. Partner at Carr, Riggs & Ingram Greedy Bastards: One City’s Texas-Size Struggle to Avoid a Financial Crisis, by Sheryl Sculley, recommended by Terrell Blodgett, Mike Hogg Professor Emeritus in Urban Management, LBJ School, University of Texas, Austin. Thirty Explosive Years in Los Angeles County by John Anson Ford, recommended by Benjamin M. Effinger, Operations Chief, Cash Management Division, Los Angeles County Treasurer and Tax Collector. Smarter Government: How to Govern for Results in the Information Age, by Martin O'Malley, recommended by Robert Shea, partner Guidehouse. #BandGReportRecommendations #CityandCountyManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalPolicyImplementation #GovernmentforResults #GovernorMartinOMalley #RobertShea #LosAngelesCounty #StateofTexas #TerrellBlodgett #DeanMichaelMead #AmericanSocietyofPublicAdministration #KarenGarrett #Equity #AlishaGillis #RouteFifty #GoverningMagaine #LBJSchoolUniversityofTexas #SchoolofPublicAdministrationUniversityofNebraska #BJReed #BookRecommendationsforGovernmentManagers

How many times have you read articles that refer to “cities and states,’ as though those two entities cover the waterfront for the broader term “local government”? Often, we’ll bet. But whenever we see references like that, we immediately wonder, “what happened to the counties?” There are over 3,000 counties (or so-called county-equivalents) in the United States with some 3.6 million employees, and they are at the center of many of the functions that Americans think of as government roles, just beginning with courts, jails, health care, education, transportation and human services. They range in size from itty-bitty ones like Loving County Texas with a population of 64 to Los Angeles County California with almost 10 million residents (that’s more people than in the ten smallest states combined). It's long interested us to see how many well-educated friends of ours have been almost entirely ignorant of the significance of counties. This may be largely explained because many of them are from New York City, and so aren’t living in a part of the country where the word “county” comes up very frequently or in Connecticut, the one state that doesn’t actually have any counties at all, except for those that serve as geographic boundaries on maps. We became even more acutely aware of just how much counties could be the center of a pressing issue, yet still kept out of the loop when we co-authored a white paper with Don Kettl for the IBM Center for the Business of Government. As we wrote, “Though counties represent the level of government that tends to get the least attention, they have historically served as the cornerstones of health policies, including immunizations that keep diseases like diphtheria, pertussis, and measles at bay. Yet when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a playbook to guide vaccination distribution in October of 2020, counties barely received a mention. “Not only did the federal government fail to communicate effectively with the counties, but the states often lacked similar actions. This left many counties swimming upstream as the (vaccine) rollout began to move forward.” With all this in mind, we were particularly eager to read a new book that has just come out called Governing on the Ground: The Past Present, and Future of County Governments that helps put the importance of counties into perspective through a series of essays by people who make the counties work. The essays, written in first person, give readers some perspective about the heroics and heartbreaks of county leaders from coast to coast. Typical is the moving story of Douglas County Nebraska Commissioner Mary Ann Borgeson who was put in the painful position of becoming a caretaker to a mother with Alzheimer’s disease and a father who was diagnosed with cancer. “It was a grueling schedule,” she writes, “because I was also looking after my husband who was being treated for cancer. Sometimes, my husband and Daddy were at the infusion center together, not a family outing I’d wish on anyone.” She writes about her efforts in Douglas County to help others who were in similar positions, by trying to ensure that there were enough people to serve in positions as “drivers, home-health aides, housekeeping, you name it. . . “ The county couldn’t turn its back, and so, she writes, “We just looked for new ways to provide the services and made sure our elderly received their food deliveries and medications. For doctors’ visits, we used telemedicine, and to see how our residents were faring we checked in via Zoom. Technology, while not a solution to the staffing shortages, improved our outreach. Communication is key to accomplishing this. You have to make certain that you are providing the services people want and need. You also have to stay in touch with the private providers to find out where they are running into trouble, and with your state and federal delegations to see that you have the funds to pay the providers.” This is only the beginning of the work that Douglas County does to help serve its older residents, and like many of the other essayists in the book, Borgeson tells the story well, and with humanity. As Matthew Chase, CEO and executive director of the National Association of Counties wrote in the forward, “County leaders are on the front lines. When a road needs repaving, a family member overdoses from a fentanyl-laced substance or nursing-home patients are overwhelmed by COVID-19 residents expect results. They care about their potholed ruined tires or whether their loved ones will survive the virus. End of story. No debate about it.”

There’s no shortage of news reports about fiscal scandals, and while we doubt the number of convicted politicians and employees has grown, startling cases of public sector malfeasance crop up with disturbing regularity. We were reminded of this over the weekend, when we saw a Nov. 15 article about the causes of political corruption from the Sol Price School of Public Policy at USC, the University of Southern California. That piece focused on elected officials, but corruption isn’t limited to just people who got their jobs through the ballot box, but also include appointees and others who, one way or another, have their hands someplace near the public coffers. While all governments are vulnerable to fraud, strong internal controls, careful fiscal oversight, and a focus on ethics training can insulate governments from the pain of dealing with fiscal scandals. A couple of years ago, a GFOA session about ethics set us off on a determined exploration of some of the common aspects of fiscal scandals that involve powerful individuals. We subsequently had long talks with the city manager of Durango, Colorado, as well as officials in Cincinnati, Stonecrest, Georgia and Buncombe, County, North Carolina, which had all experienced financial scandals of their own in recent years. Toward the end of July 2022, Route Fifty published our column about the arduous task that government officials have when faced with a financial scandal. Our research also led us to a fascinating documentary called, “All the Queen’s Horses” – also recommended to us by a very smart GFOA staffer, Katie Ludwig. We’ve included a video of the documentary trailer at the bottom of this article. The film itself is worth watching to see the story behind what has been labeled the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history – the embezzlement of $53,7 million over many years by the former longtime comptroller of Dixon, Illinois, Rita Crundwell. When we discovered that the producer and director of the film, Kelly Richmond Pope, was an accounting professor at DePaul University, we decided to learn about the creation of the documentary and the messages that she most wanted this compelling work to deliver. The following is a brief edited transcript of the conversation we had with Pope in July 2022. B&G: What were you hoping that your documentary would communicate to people about government fraud? Kelly Richmond Pope: I was hoping that the documentary would show people how a trusted employee can commit fraud. Sometimes, a finance person or accounting person can be the most powerful person in the room because other people don’t know or understand the same information that they do. A lot of reliance is placed on them. They tend to have a lot of power. B&G: Is there a difference in the level or opportunity for fraud in the public and private sectors? Kelly Richmond Pope: To me, the fraud schemes are pretty much the same, regardless of whether they’re governmental, corporate or nonprofit. B&G: Are their similarities that you see when you look particularly at government fraud or fraud involving high-level officials? Kelly Richmond Pope: I think the commonality is there’s always an abuse of power and always unlimited access because of the blind trust that’s given. Power and privilege are to me, always behind governmental fraud. I don’t believe there are schemes just designed for state and local governments. I think the schemes are the same, but in government you have people who are in positions much longer than in the corporate sector. So, when you have a longtime employee who has been somewhere for 20 years, it’s easier to conceal that kind of thing. B&G: Your documentary paints a very clear picture of the life that Rita Crundwell was able to lead, based on the millions of dollars that she embezzled in Dixon. Were there others to blame besides her for what happened? Kelly Richmond Pope: When I did the documentary, I wanted to make sure that there was a balanced view of blame and a balanced view of accountability. Yes, there was an audit failure on the side of the auditors. And yes, there was some failure on the side of the bank and there was failure on the side of the (elected officials). But there’s also failure on the side of the residents, too. We should mind (government) business the same way we mind our personal affairs, but we don’t. B&G: Does a more aggressive active auditing function help protect an entity? Kelly Richmond Pope: Audits aren’t really designed to find fraud because they take a random sample of transactions. The best thing to do, I think, to protect an entity is to make sure that you have good training and a good internal whistleblowing process in place so that when people have something to say, they will. Those are the things I think are important. B&G: After a scandal, how hard is it to win back resident trust? Kelly Richmond Pope: It’s a tough thing to win back. It may take several administrations in order to do that. The tough part when scandal happens is the thing that you can’t see. It’s the emotional side, the emotional toll that you can’t clean up and that’s what I think is hard. #CityandCountyManagement #PerformanceManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentFraud #PublicSectorFinance #StateandLocalGovernment #GovernmentOversight #HumanResources #PublicSectorHumanResources #PublicSectorWorkforce #EmployeeEmbezzlement #DixonIllinois #PublicFinance #AllTheQueensHorses #GovernmentAccountability #GovernmentAuditing #Whistleblowing #GovernmentTrust #KellyRichmondPope #GovernmentFinancialScandal #StateandLocalGovernmentFinancialScandal #StateofIllinois #TrustinGovernment #StateandLocalGovernmentEmployeeEmbezzlement #PublicSectorFraud

Our late friend and colleague Harry Hatry long insisted that data is far more valuable when it’s disaggregated. In a January 2022 paper for the Urban Institute, which we were honored to co-author with him, he maintained that performance data is particularly useful when you “compare the outcome values broken out (disaggregated) by demographic characteristics (e.g., by age group, race/ethnicity, gender, education level, and location—such as neighborhood, state, or other geographical location).” Over the course of years, we have grown to believe that Hatry's point is not just sensible, it's absolutely critical to manage a vastly complex nation. We've grown increasingly frustrated, for example, at the broad descriptions of states as red or blue. Texas is almost always described as a red state. But according to NBC Affiliate, KXAN, "Four . . . counties have given Democrats an average margin of victory of more than 30 percentage points: Travis, Presidio, El Paso and Webb. Of counties with more than 100,000 registered voters, Travis County, home to Austin, gives Democrats the most support, with an average margin of victory of 41.71 percentage points." The need to politically disaggregate is only the most obvious example. The attraction of any one-size-fits all managerial solution is headed in the wrong direction (at least for some places). Dealing with the housing crisis in big cities is an entirely different matter than doing the same thing in rural America for example. As a result, states that try to come up with solutions that will work equally well in both kinds of localities are likely going to fail one or the other (or maybe even both). Michael Jacobson, director of Performance and Strategy at the King County Office of Performance Strategy and Budgets put the matter eloquently when he pointed us some time ago to adage he had once heard: "Aggregate to communicate and disaggregate to manage." These lessons are brought into stark relief by a report by the Census Bureau that stops us from ever thinking that the median population of states is a truly meaningful figure. The title of the report gets right to the point: "New Census Bureau Visualization Shows Broad Variations in Age." Consider Florida. Its median age in 2021 was 42.7, somewhat higher than next-door neighbor Georgia with a median age of 37.5. But does this mean that all of Florida is a place where retirees tend to go for low taxes and sunny weather? Not really, if you visit Leon County, with a population approaching 300,000. That county, home to the state capital, appropriately named for explorer Ponce de Leon, who is said to have sought the Fountain of Youth, has a median age of 32.1. By wild contrast, Sumter County, Florida, has a median age of 68.3, the highest of any county in the country. No surprise there. Sumter County is effectively little more than the home of The Villages, a master-planned age-restricted community with 130,000 people and virtually no children. Florida is not unusual, as the Census Bureau points out. Median ages ranged from county to county in practically every state. South Dakota, for example, had an extremely low median age of 23.0 in tiny Todd County, primarily home to Native Americans compared to 56.3 in Custer County. These age ranges are of consequence for a number of reasons. For example, when states distribute finances to counties based on their total populations, it might be wise for them to take the individual counties’ median ages into account. Consider the funding that went out to counties to help them deal with Covid vaccinations, particularly in the early days of the pandemic. Given the greater likelihood of hospitalizations and deaths among older people, it would have made simple sense to look at these disaggregated figures and spend more in the counties with higher median ages. Lumping people together into any monolith is often misleading, and age is only one example. Consider the words of Laura Zhang Choi, a Warren County school-board member who testified to New Jersey legislators that the state would be well served by breaking down the component parts of New Jersey’s Asian American residents, according to an article in Verve Times. She pointed the legislators to New York City as a powerful example, and according to the article she told the legislators that, “about 11% of city residents suffer from diabetes, and the rate among Asian Americans is roughly the same at 12%. But a deeper look showed an alarming figure for Indian Americans, nearly double the city average at 21%. That information disappeared when all Asian ethnicities were lumped together.” The importance of disaggregation – for many other factors – was clearly spelled out in a podcast featuring Amy O’Hara, Research Professor in the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. As she explained, “When we think about the way that our communities are reflected in data, the biggest regular data collection is a decennial census. Every 10 years information is pulled together about every single resident in the United States. And for that information, in order to do apportionment, you say, how many humans are there in the U.S. and that’s adequate for that purpose. “But then, you really want to start breaking it down. What are the characteristics of these people? How many are male? How many are female? How many are old? How many are young? And you get these disaggregations of the data that were collected. The aggregate information is useful, but depending on what your policy question is, it’s not going to be useful enough.” #PerformanceManagement #StateandLocalGovernment #Equity #PublicSectorData #CityandCountyManagement #PerformanceMeasurement #DisaggregatedData #MichaelJaccobson #KingCounty #Disaggregation #UrbanInstitute #Covid #CensusBureau #PerformanceData #DataDisaggregation #KingCountyOfficeofPerformanceandStrategy #DataVisualization #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceMeasurement#McCourtSchoolofPublicPolicy

We are puzzled and frustrated with the ignorance of many people about the importance of state and local government management. They tend to be acutely aware of the politics in the places where they live. And many have strong opinions about policies of all sorts that directly affect them. But when we bring up management, we frequently get the kind of look you’d anticipate seeing on the face of someone confronted with a detailed explanation of quantum physics. These aren’t uneducated folks we’re complaining about. In fact, we’re acutely aware of this phenomenon based on conversations with friends and family (among whom are doctors, teachers, lawyers, professors, and accountants). It recently came as a surprise to us when we were showing this website to someone who has been a mental health counselor for years. She’s a friend, and so made an effort to kindly express some interest. But then she made it clear that, since it was about government, it had nothing important to do with her life. We persuaded her (at least for the moment) that states and localities had a great deal to do with mental health care. (In fact, at this very moment we’re writing a column for Route Fifty about this very topic). We know we’re not the only ones who are aware of this phenomenon. Over the last 30-plus years, we’ve become aware of a secret weapon we have when interviewing people about their work in government management: they’re hungry for someone who genuinely cares about what they do for a living, because they don’t get that from their friends and neighbors, and even their spouses, parents and adult children. Think about the public sector folks who refer to themselves as “policy wonks” or “policy nerds.” At least they tend to use these potentially pejorative terms with a tone of pride. People who implement those policies don’t even have a supposed-to-be-funny way of describing themselves altogether. All of this is really a pity, especially at a time when trust in government is waning in large part because of the poisoned seeds of partisan politics. It would be nice, indeed, if more people saw work done by diligent public employees to make sure that they get the services they rely on for safety, transportation, health care, economic development, and much, much more. #stateandlocalmanagement #RouteFifty #stateandlocalgovernment #stateandlocalgovernmentmanagement #barrettandgreene

We’ve just been reading a splendid book by Erik Larson, titled “The Splendid and the Vile,” that tells the tale of Winston Churchill in the early years of World War II. At one point, Larson writes about the Marshall Plan which was designed to restore postwar Europe in the wake of the war. We had always been under the impression that the credit for this effort belonged to Secretary of State George Marshall. After all, the plan was named for him. But the book points to Averell Harriman, the Secretary of Commerce at the time, as the individual who coordinated the implementation of the plan. We should have known better. Over the course of years, we’ve been aware that the people who generate new policies -- often elected officials – get much of the credit, or blame, for major projects and programs. But in the months or years that follow, it’s the implementers of the world who are the most vital players. These are the folks who labor long days and nights to turn visions into reality and the people we turn to when we’re writing about government policies. Unsurprisingly, when we have these conversations, these individuals frequently talk about how important gubernatorial or mayoral missions have been in getting them started. There’s some sense in that because without a broad goal, no one would be empowered to try to accomplish it. But it’s also smart, when talking to the press, to give credit to their bosses if they want to get ahead. With this in mind, we were impressed by Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut when he was talking about the state’s efforts to deal with the pandemic. For many months he gave a regular series of speeches about the state’s progress, but he almost always turned the microphone over to someone else who was central to making things happen. For example, when the state established the Connecticut Future Fund, he called on David Lehman, then commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development to deliver the message. One state over, by contrast, New York’s then-governor Andrew Cuomo (who later resigned from office after scandals uprooted his term), was also giving speeches that catapulted him to national popularity as the hero of the calamity. It was very much a one-man show, which may have enhanced his fame (at least for a while) but didn’t give credit where it was due. We can’t say that many of the men and women who labor in the trenches of implementation are particularly troubled by this kind of thing, though perhaps some are. Few people go into public service to get airtime on the nightly news. But there is a deeper problem here. With much emphasis going to the grand new ideas of the world, we’ve seen any number of policy makers, as well as organizations that help to create new policies, ignore the second part of the equation, and that is a problem. When policies are developed without regard for the ways in which they are going to be successfully developed, it’s entirely too easy for the people who create them to gloss over the critical next steps to fruition. Sometimes the problem can be as simple as a lack of plans for funding, which can leave new policy ideas as little more than paperwork exercises. Other times, the necessary technology just isn’t in place. In still other instances, there’s a lack of the necessary workforce to make things happen. The list goes on and on. All of this can easily leave the unfortunate people given the task of implementing policy struggling as they try to figure out how to make something happen, when the original concept had flaws that would only be discovered as it was implemented. At the end of the day, we believe that policy makers and implementers must work hand in hand before the ribbon cuttings and grand announcements. There are certainly some places in which that’s the way things work, but it’s our impression that there are far too few. There need to be more. #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #PolicyImplementation #ConnecticutGovernorNedLamont #StateandLocalPandemicResponse #Pandemic #DedicatedtoStateandLocalGovernment #NewYorkGovernorAndrewCuomo #AverellHarriman #TheSplendidandTheVile #ImportanceofPolicyImplementation #StateandLocalImplementation #StateofConnecticut #StateofNewYork

We’d probably be the subject of justifiable ridicule if we were to come out against the notion of work life balance in the public sector workforce. The very notion that state and local employees should be able to balance dedication to their jobs with time enough for friends, family and pleasurable activities is nothing short of good common sense and is a major attraction for potential new employees. Yet, in recent months as we’ve chatted with a number of managers, we seem to be running across a phenomenon that – taken to its extremes – can be debilitating to their lives. It’s pretty simple. When employees are overly focused on a definition of work-life balance that tips too far in the direction of life and away from work, somebody has to pick up the slack. Not to knock members of the GenZ generation, but lately we’ve been hearing a fair number of middle manager – even middle managers in their thirties -- grousing about the extra work they’re doing because younger employees feel free to say no. As generational expert Kristin Scroggin told us recently, “I think social media has given them the idea that there can be this perfect life – that there’s a place where you can work when you want to, and only work in a job where you’re happy and fulfilled all the time. And if you’re not happy you should leave.” This issue is particularly pressing at a time when state and local governments are struggling to hire and retain enough good employees to do necessary work. As Mission Square Research Institute reported a few months ago, “State and local governments continue to face severe labor shortages . . .” Certainly, the absence of enough workers is putting great pressure on employees at all levels. Another Mission Square Report found 77 percent of respondents felt that the increase in workers leaving their jobs was putting a strain on their own workloads. Last summer, we wrote a report about the problem of workplace fatigue. Most of it was focused on shift workers who are paid time and a half for overtime. But fatigue, we learned, was also a major issue for exempt employees who aren’t eligible for overtime. Faced with labor shortages, they end up taking on more work themselves. “There’s a level of middle management that just absorbs the work because they can’t necessarily ask their employees to do overtime,” said Janeen Haller-Abernathy, who runs the internal Employee Assistance Program in Colorado. “It’s almost like the workload has moved up the chain instead of down the chain.” To make matter worse, at a time like this, it can be nearly impossible for a supervisor to get to be too harsh when employees insist that they have already put in their 35-hour week, and so they’re going home regardless of whether their work has been completed. As the old saying goes, “People don’t leave jobs, they leave supervisors,” and a supervisor who seems to be too pushy may be just the kind of person who drives away the workers they’ve been struggling to attract. It’s part of the American dream that if you work long enough and hard enough, eventually, you’ll reach a point where the drudge work falls to the people who report to you. If they can’t or won’t do it, though, then the dream can turn into a nightmare. Typically, we like to write columns that have a happy ending, loaded with solutions that others can use. But this is an instance in which the only solution we can see is one we don’t want to see – and that’s an escalating unemployment rate, where younger staffers are happy just to have a job and are less inclined to let their work get done by the people who hired them. #stateandlocalmanagement #stateandlocalgovernmenthumanresources #humanresources #Colorado #workplacefatigue #kristinscroggin #worklifebalance #GenerationZ

Several years ago – right before the start of the pandemic -- our book, The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-Informed Management was published by Rowman & Littlefield. This past weekend, we had a somewhat jarring reminder of the pitfall aspect of that title in a recently-released City of Austin performance audit: The audit, titled Strategic Direction 2023: Progress on Economic Opportunity and Affordability Outcome, takes issue with the timeliness and quality of the performance measures used to measure strategic outcomes in the Texas state capital. The subhead of the audit, was sobering: “Issues With Performance Measures, Monitoring and Delays Affected the City’s Ability to Measure and Report Progress Towards a Key Strategic Outcome.” While the audit noted that its exploration of the use of performance measurement only concerned one of six strategic objectives, it noted that the conclusions drawn likely applied “to the other five outcome areas as well.” Here are a handful of problems cited that underscore fairly typical challenges with state and local government performance measurement: · There were issues with the timeliness of reported data. In fact, only 23% of measures covered the most recently completed fiscal year. The audit labeled 46% of data as “old data.” · While the goal was to measure equity, too few measures examined progress with an equity lens. While the five-year strategic planning document stated that “Race is the primary predictor of outcomes,” only 23% of economic opportunity/affordability measures could be disaggregated by race/ ethnicity, · When surveyed by the auditor, department teams raised concerns about data quality. According to the audit, of 24 comments received, “the majority (67%) expressed negative opinions about the data quality of performance measures.” Problems focused on data sources that were difficult to update in a timely way; dependence on unreliable third-party data, and a lack of connection between the measures used and the work of their own departments. · The performance measures lacked targets. “The lack of targets makes it very difficult to determine where the City has been successful or where more effort is needed,” auditors wrote. · Over half the measures focused on “community indicators”, in which results depend on a wide variety of external factors with potential results difficult to connect with government funding, management or policy choices. There’s a clear silver lining around the storm clouds that these problems represent. Left unexamined and unaddressed, the “promises” part of our book’s title can be little more than the clichéd “best laid plans,” that often go awry. In fact, we want to give credit to the City of Austin Audit Office for following up on how the performance measurement effort is working. The problems cited just go to echo a message that we have delivered over time (and in our book) that performance measurement is hard to do, and that it heavily depends on timely and high-quality data. This kind of audit should not discourage the effort, which is very necessary, but help to improve performance measurement in this and other cities, counties and states. #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceAudit #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceMeasurement #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalPerformance #StateandLocalGovernmentData #PublicSectorDataQuality #CityofAustin #AustinAuditOffice #PerformanceMeasurementPitfalls #PerformanceMeasurementChallenges #DataTimeliness #DataQuality #EconomicOpportunity #StateandLocalStrategicOutcomes #ThirdPartyDataReliability #PerformanceMeasurementTargets #PromisesandPitfallsofPerformanceInformedManagement #BarrettandGreene #CityPerformanceMeasurement #CommunityIndicators

Episode Two: Inappropriate Computer Access - We don’t recall any performance auditors complaining to us about the frustration they must feel when they find similar operational shortcomings repeated year after year. But we can only speculate that even the most patient and understanding of auditors must want to tear their hair out when they see that governmental agencies seem condemned to repeat past problems despite the performance auditors’ good work. Hence the Sisyphus title of this occasional series, which stems from our feeling that performance auditors have a lot in common with the mythological figure who was condemned to arduously roll a rock up a hill, only to watch it slide down again and start over. In this, the second episode of this series, we’re looking at two related problems that come up over and over again: Employees who leave their jobs but retain access to sensitive government technology systems. Access to sensitive data that is granted to too many employees leaving the possibility of potentially compromised security or privacy. Consider the December 2022 audit of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, which pointed out that the department did not “promptly or properly deactivate 17 terminated employees’ access” to the state’s criminal justice and accounting systems. For the 10 former employees who had criminal justice access, the failure to deactivate also permitted continued use of the National Crime Information Center and the International Justice and Public Safety Information Sharing Network. For those individuals, the cutoff only occurred between a year and 25 months after they left government, according to the audit. A similar problem was found in three prior Connecticut Department of Emergency Services audits which occurred in 2012 through 2019. There’s no reason to think that any of the former employees had ill intent, but still “unauthorized access to a protected information system can jeopardize the security of the information in the system,” auditors wrote, noting that untimely deactivation stemmed from a lack of communication between human resources and individuals responsible for providing tech access. The agency agreed with the findings and has been improving its internal controls, while also putting in place weekly reports to provide improved monitoring. That might solve one agency’s specific difficulty, but our experience gives us little doubt that the same issue will crop up elsewhere. That same month, a Department of Law Enforcement operational audit in Florida also found that user access privileges “weren’t always removed upon separation.” One of the causes cited was “untimely notice of employee separation.” A similar problem was also found there in 2020. In both cases, auditors also cited “inappropriate access” among employees who continued to work for the state, but whose jobs didn’t require the use of the technology. The 2022 audit noted that there was an unmet need for periodic review of who can log into potentially sensitive computer systems. There’s more. In November 2022, two other audits came out that raised similar issues; one in Hillsborough County, Florida and the other in San Antonio, Texas. In November 2022, in an audit titled “ServTracker System Access Controls” auditors in the county reported that “not all user accounts belonging to separated employees or contractors were disabled in a timely manner,” while the November audit of the San Antonio Fire Department Arson Bureau found that user access for fire department arson investigative software was “not routinely terminated” when fire department employees left the bureau. It also found that “employee access to the evidence tracking software was not always appropriate,” and recommended more diligent periodic reviews. Even when problems like this persist in multiple places, journalists and other government observers don’t tend to take note. We do. Our hope is that columns like this one can help to draw management attention to audit findings that are depressingly common. And we invite our readers to make recommendations for future episodes of the Sisyphus files (we love that name!) #Featured #BarrettandGreene #StateandLocalPerformanceAudit #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #PerformanceAudit #StateandLocalHumanResources #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalGovernmentAccountability #PublicSectorDataAnalysis #Cybersecurity #StateandLocalPolicyImplementation #StateEmployeeComputerAccess #CityEmployeeComputerAccess #CountyEmployeeComputerAccess #UnprotectedComputerAccess #SisyphusFiles #RepeatAuditFindings #GovernmentOversight #BarrettandGreeneSpecialFeature #BarrettandGreeneSisyphusSeries #ConnecticutAudit #SanAntonioAudit. #HillsboroughCountyAudit #FloridaAuditorGeneral #KatherineBarrettandRichardGreene #ComputerAccessAuditFindings #OperationalAudit #LaxGovernmentPrivacyProtections

While we generally write about the use of performance measurements in the realm of state and local government, lessons can be learned about their use – and their potential flaws – from a wide variety of sources, including major league baseball. Over the last twenty years or so, baseball managers have become increasingly convinced that, rather than trust their instincts, they should rely on reams of data that are supposed to help them to improve fielding and hitting in a variety of ways. The practice was jettisoned into public’s awareness when Author Michael Lewis wrote his bestselling book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” It showed how the Oakland Athletics had used data to put together a strong team, even though it had one of the smallest payrolls in the sport at the time. Baseball, which has long been a sport full of statistics, seemed like the ideal environment for such a movement just as government (which also thrives on data) is a place where metrics can be powerful tools. But beyond the common sense of the issue, there are some, in both government and baseball, who feel this reliance can have some downsides, as a recent article in the New York Times pointed out when it quoted record-holding slugger Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees. The Times reported that “he believes data can ultimately be manipulated to have whatever desired outcome a party is looking for.” Clearly most data aren’t being misused in this way, but Judge makes a good cautionary point for both baseball and government. The Yankee was quoted saying, “We get a lot of numbers, but I think we might be looking at the wrong ones and maybe should value some other ones that some people might see as having no value.” Another good point for both baseball and government. Some players told the Times that the over-reliance on data had the perverse effect of removing reliance on instincts that could be beneficial to a player’s game. Reported the newspaper, one player indicated that “there were numerous voices in his ear earlier in the season and it messed with his swing because of all the tinkering the numbers were suggesting.” Here, too, we can see how government managers might learn something from the comments of these professional athletes. When government employees are inundated with data to rule the way they do their jobs, there can easily be a tendency to believe that their managers already know all the answers, and there’s little need to consider their own instincts. That kind of attitude can rob an organization of the insights that employees might have – beyond those reasons that are based in the analytics. And that’s not a good thing.