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podcast

Interview with Dan Cunningham, Chief People Officer, New York State Office of General Services

Dan discusses why an appreciation culture is valuable in tough economic times.  He discusses the importance of using appreciation to retain top performing employees.  He also discusses how many people who attended the training were initially skeptical about how this could help them, then witnessed the dynamic change as they saw the value of using appreciation in their leadership roles.

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Transcript

CE:  This is our weekly Carrot Culture podcast coming to you live and in color from beautiful Albany, New York, and it is my great pleasure to welcome to the podcast Dan Cunningham who is the director of human resource management at the New York Office of General Services.  He is also known as the Chief People Officer, so welcome to the podcast.

DC:  Thank you very much, Chester.

CE:  Now we just did a session with your leaders on the power of appreciation and we’ve also had some training done.  Given that you are a state government agency, and so on, and in these tough times, why are you focusing on appreciation as a leadership need now?

DC:  Well, we did an employee satisfaction survey last year. The employees told us that for the most part the agency was doing very well. We were very pleased with the results.  It was 72% overall satisfaction rating of our employees, which we thought was outstanding—not as well as where we’d like to be, but it was outstanding.  But the one thing that they talked about, the missing ingredient was that we weren’t demonstrating enough how we value and appreciate our employees.  And, as you mentioned, my internal title here is the Chief People Officer and over the past year we’ve gone through a transition in the agency with Commissioner Egan leading the charge on that.  We’ve turned our Human Resources office, and we now call it the People Department, and our slogan is “We’re all about people!”  So what we’ve been trying to do in our leadership development programming here, and working with our managers and supervisors directly, is to get them to understand that the people aspect of their job is the critical imperative when you look at success for the organization.  If we can leverage the power of our people, if we can bring them into the conversation and empower them to do great things, that’s how we’ll be a better organization.  So that’s why we’re focusing on it right now.

CE:  How important is it right now, with all the uncertainty, that you keep your employees engaged?

DC:  I think it’s tremendously important.  Every day in the newspaper we’re hearing more and more about the economy.  We read it just like everybody else and I think we’re impacted a little bit more as public sector organizations because when the state government has to deal with shrinking revenues, it impacts directly each of the line agencies.  And so our budget has been cut pretty significantly the past six to eight months and it becomes more and more important for us to have engaged, fully engaged, employees because we all have to be pulling the oars in the same direction.
CE:  Well, it’s interesting, you know, we were talking about the impact that appreciation can have on retention, and you know, with people cutting back and so on and so forth, one of your directors said, “Oh no, that’s more important than ever because if we lose those people, we can’t replace them.”  I thought it was a very interesting aspect of the retention policy.  Can you speak to that a little bit, about how important it is to keep your top people on board?

DC:  Yeah.  I mean, bottom line is we’re in a hard hiring freeze, so if they leave we can’t fill the job.  So we really need to keep everybody, all the assets that we have right now, we have to keep them on site and on post doing the work of the people.  More importantly though, for our top performers is, as we see that we have attrition data—and we watch that.  You have people who transfer because of relocations of spouses, or they get other offers, they transfer to other agencies, so right now in the environment that we’re in with dwindling resources, having to do, you know, that mantra of ‘more with less’ that everybody’s dealing with these days, it’s so much more important to have our top performers here and make sure that they understand that we need them, we value their contributions, and we want to help them succeed because their success ultimately is our success.

CE:  Very good.  You know, you’ve actually taken the step of having Andrea Gappmayer come up and do the training.  There are a lot of reasons behind that.  I mean, it becomes very visible for you and that was an expense, right?  But an investment that you guys felt was really important.

DC:  Absolutely.  You know, now more than ever, in talking with the Commissioner we went through a lot.  It wasn’t an easy decision for us.  That was a considerable expense for us to outline in this current environment, but we talked about it and felt now there’s no other time like these times when we’re in turbulent economic times.  But this is when we need to focus on and thank our folks and value and appreciate them because they have a choice to be with us, they have the choice to stay with us.  They don’t have to be here.  They could go to any other agency.  They could leave and go to any other employer. We want to keep those people here.  We want to let them know we value their contributions every day, so this, in our mind, was a very…we believe that the initial investment that we have for the training, for the materials that go along with it, that the benefits that will be derived from that are probably ten/twenty times more than what we’ve expended, so it was a positive business decision for us to make.

CE:  Great! Tell me about some of the feedback you got from some of the managers after the training.

DC:  It was great!  Everybody…Andrea was fantastic!  It was interesting to see the dynamic in the room because we’re a traditional blue collar kind of agency and around here we like to keep things simple.  That’s not because our folks are incapable of understanding concepts and complex principles, but simple works best.  Organizationally you keep it simple, people understand the message, and they move forward.  So it was interesting to see the dynamic of the groups coming in because some of them thought, “Oh, I’m going here…Why do I need to be here? I recognize everybody already.” And some of those people who’d say that to me, I was like, “Yeah, well I talked to somebody who was on your team yesterday and they don’t seem too happy, but I’m glad you have a good opinion of yourself.”
But we saw the dynamics switch during the program.  There was a point, I believe, there was a juncture in the program where things crystallized and people understood and they started to get more engaged.  I was seeing all the orange bags, walking along with people leaving, and every person, to the individual, stopped me and said, “This was the best training I’ve had.  I enjoyed it tremendously.  I’m going to try to do my best to implement the principles, but it really was good.”  And they all talked about, some of them talked about how they wrote their thank you notes and they were really excited about distributing them.  So we’ve had some very positive feedback from it.

CE:  That’s excellent.  What are you hoping that this will do for the culture in your agency? 

DC:  I’m hoping that what we’ve done here in the last couple of weeks is really that we’ll unleash the power that can be derived when we just simply go about the business of treating people respectfully and sincerely thanking them for their help in helping us achieve our goals.  We have a lot of priorities right now and the chief among them is spending reduction, so we’re doing a lot of things to help the agency help the governor in his overall program on eliminating the gap for state government.  And that’s got a cost.  It’s a lot of time, and it’s a lot of effort, it’s a lot of personal sacrifice that we know our employees are going through, and we know their families are going through.  So, what we’re hopeful is that by putting our line managers through the program that we can really start bringing and cultivating that culture of the Carrot here at OGS.

CE:  Excellent.  You might even start wearing orange ties! 

DC:  Yeah.  My daughter would probably say that’s a good thing because I wore my first pink tie this summer!  If I came out with an orange tie, that would be great.

CE:  We spent a little time with the Commissioner and he showed us an award that he was giving to the employees and it has a great saying at the bottom.  Do you want to just take a minute and talk about that?  I thought it was very tender.

DC:  Commissioner Egan is probably one of the most respected leaders in state government.  He’s been in state government for well over forty years.  He was Commissioner here previously, then left and has moved back, and the one thing that makes my job easy as the People Officer here is that the Commissioner is all about people.  When I have to talk with him about something, he is right behind us, so we get great support there.  But the Commissioner got an award when he left the agency once before.  It’s a piece of marble of the Empire State Plaza.  If you haven’t been to Albany,  the Empire State Plaza was Nelson Rockefeller’s vision of the ultimate government complex, a 21st century government complex that was built thirty years ago…forty years ago now.  It was the 1960’s/1970’s.  And what that piece of marble has, it has a picture of the plaza on it, and there’s a small bronze plaque in there and it’s to Commissioner Egan from the Employees of OGS and it simply says, “We care because you care.”  And I think that’s the message of the programs that you bring to us, that whole message of the Carrot is “we care because you care.”  And that’s what we’re going to try to do here and that’s every day the Commissioner, that’s his number one priority, is how are our people doing?  And we talk every day.  He will call me and say, “How are our people doing today?  What’s going on?  Have we accomplished some things today?  Who have we helped?”  And it’s been a great time with him and there’s no better leader that I can think of working for in state government right now. 

CE:  That’s high praise.  Hey, listen, as we wrap up, thanks for taking the time.  Thanks for being a Carrot Champion and thanks for having us.  We really appreciate it.

DC:  Thank you.

CE:  Take care now.