Back in October, an anonymous letter writer claiming to be a member of the city’s Neighborhood Resources Department wrote a letter to Mayor Sue Hack.

Director Victor Torres had been mean to department employees, the writer said. Workloads were getting too heavy. Employees were leaving to find jobs elsewhere.

Though city officials won’t comment on specifics, they say they investigated the allegations and found some concerns to be more valid than others. That prompted officials to spend $2,200 on a consultant to help Neighborhood Resources administration and staff learn to communicate with each other.

The story illustrates a key lesson Lawrence city commissioners learned Thursday during a study session: Unhappy city employees are costly to taxpayers.

“You need to look at your least-satisfied employees,” Jackie Counts of GRI Research Inc. told commissioners, “because they’re costing you money.”

Unhappy employees quit or just call in absent more frequently, she said. Absenteeism costs the city of Lawrence more than $2 million a year, Counts said — more than the $1.38 million in annual aid the city lost when the state cut funding.

The city has an employee absentee rate of 3.4 percent, Counts said, while the national average for all employees is 2.1 percent.

“If we lowered absenteeism to the national average, we’d save $800,000 a year,” said City Commission candidate Lee Gerhard, who attended the meeting. Candidate Greg DiVilbiss also attended, while incumbent candidate Mike Rundle attended as a sitting commission member.

GRI Research surveyed city employees last year after commissioners gave City Manager Mike Wildgen six months to make City Hall more “user friendly.”

Wildgen survived the de facto probation, but commissioners also hired GRI to do two studies: one to measure the satisfaction of city employees and the other of city residents.

Seventy-five percent of the city’s 750 employees answered the survey. They generally rated themselves high in customer service and their department’s reputation in the community, but said city officials didn’t do a good job of promoting from within.

Though GRI officials never mentioned departments or administrators by name during Thursday’s study session, employees in two city departments gave consistently low scores for morale: Finance (which handles city billing) and Neighborhood Resources.

“Some departments are falling below consistently … maybe those are areas where you should look,” Counts said.

Dave Kingsley, president of GRI Research, said the survey results shouldn’t be used to clean house at City Hall. Instead, he said, city administrators should begin management training programs and involve city employees in making departmental improvements.

“We did not want this to be a reason to find somebody to lower the boom on,” Kingsley said. “This should be the beginning of a process of improvement. Let’s declare amnesty and move on.”

Hack agreed.

“What we say now is ‘This is where we’re at,'” she said. “‘How are we going to get better?'”

That process already has started in Neighborhood Resources because of the anonymous letter.

“We want to provide an environment that’s fruitful for the staff,” Torres said. “We’ve come a long way.”

Commissioners will meet again, probably within the next month, to begin considering action inspired by the survey.