As you may know, we have the results from the employee engagement survey conducted in late 2018. We wanted to hold off on sharing them until department directors had a chance to review their individual results with employees, which has been happening over the past few weeks.
I am very pleased to now share with you the full report, which shows great improvements since our first survey in 2015. In fact, the City of Carlsbad is now consistently at or above the benchmark for city government. This is a great achievement and a credit to all city staff – the supervisors, who increased their focus on helping their employees develop, and our employees, who have found new ways to connect with our city mission.
Why does engagement matter? I won’t bore you with the details, even though I am a self-proclaimed data-geek, but it’s very clear from the research that high levels of engagement have a direct correlation to high productivity and better outcomes. When we invest in our employees’ engagement, we are also investing in the quality of what we provide to those we serve. So, our employees win, the city organization wins, and the community wins.
A couple of caveats to this report:
The report is a compilation of all city departments. So, some departments and individual supervisor ratings are higher, and some are lower. That’s okay. The reason we do the survey is so we know which areas of the organization need more support and attention.
Just because the overall results are favorable doesn’t mean we’re done. Employee engagement requires an ongoing commitment. You’ll continue to see new trainings, tools and other programs that help drive employee engagement and high performance.
Look for more information coming from the Human Resources Department, including a new online portal for supervisors that has tips, discussion guides and other resources.
Thanks again for everyone’s participation in the survey. It has been and will continue to be a valuable tool as we focus on being the very best run organization out there.
Scott Chadwick