City Commissioner Sue Hack feels like the girl left out of the party.

When Hack read a recent survey gauging how city employees felt about Lawrence’s operations, she saw a lot of good numbers. Overall satisfaction level was 80 percent, satisfaction with their immediate supervisors was above 70 percent, and more than 60 percent of employees were satisfied with their compensation and benefit packages.

“You see all these areas with 80 percent ratings and 70s, and then you get to the questions about the City Commission, and they’re in the 30s,” Hack said. “That’s pretty scary.”

Satisfaction ratings for the City Commission were the lowest recorded in the 136-question survey that was administered in October and November. The survey, which included 638 of the city’s 760 full-time employees, found 31 percent of those surveyed agreed the City Commission supported their department goals, while 32 percent disagreed. The rest were either neutral or had no opinion.

And of the five questions on the survey that registered a “statistically significant” decline from the city’s last survey in 2002, three of them were related to the City Commission.

Employees said the City Commission’s performance had slipped since 2002 in the areas of making decisions best for the community, in valuing the work done by city employees and in the category of supporting department goals.

“I would like your help in how we can have our numbers go up like everybody else’s,” Hack told staff members at last week’s City Commission meeting. “We obviously have some work to do.”

No clear answers

The survey, though, doesn’t go into many specifics about why employees feel the way they do. The surveys were taken anonymously, and city employees haven’t been offering up much information beyond the survey, presumably because no one is anxious to criticize the bosses publicly. But Kim Brice, an employee in the Police Department and chair of the city’s Employee Relations Council, said the inherently political nature of the commission might have something to do with it.

“It is hard to say what everybody was thinking, but it might be because you have change in the City Commission every two years through the elections,” Brice said. “I think that is probably part of it.”

City commissioners said they likely need to do a better job of communicating their thanks to employees on a job well-done. Commissioners do frequently mention jobs they are pleased with at their weekly commission meetings, but they said there may need to be a more formal process to ensure that rank-and-file city employees get the word.

Several commissioners said they were particularly concerned by the perception among city workers that commission decisions weren’t being made in the best interests of the entire community.

“I didn’t understand that one,” City Commissioner David Schauner said. “It might mean that we are approving projects without the right infrastructure in place, or it may be that we’re trying to shove a 12-pound project into a 6-pound sack, and that frustrates employees.

“I’m not sure what the survey tells us, but I think we need to find out. But I also know that every decision we make is going to be second-guessed by someone.”

City Commissioner Mike Rundle said he took the findings to mean that the city’s top managers needed to do a better job communicating to the commission feedback from employees as it arises.

Scrutinizing elected officials

Christopher Tatham, vice president of the survey firm ETC Institute, told commissioners there really wasn’t much data to indicate whether the feelings of Lawrence employees were any different than employees in other cities. He said most cities do not include in their surveys questions that allow employees to grade elected officials.

Frank Reeb, who oversaw the survey as director of administrative services and city clerk, said the city employee committee debated whether questions about the City Commission should be included in the survey. But Reeb said the committee decided it was important to know how employees viewed the group that sets the vision for the city.

The city did stack up well in several other areas of the survey that do have national and regional benchmarks. For example, the overall satisfaction level of 80 percent was 9 percentage points higher than the national average and 12 percentage points higher than the average for Kansas City metro-area cities, according to ETC data.

The national benchmarks also showed the city struggled in many of the same areas that other cities did. Only 34 percent of Lawrence employees thought rewards and recognition were distributed fairly – two percentage points below the national average – and only 42 percent thought internal promotions were handled fairly. That also was two percentage points below the national average.

What’s ahead

Reeb said his department would break the results down via department and present those findings to city commissioners in the next couple of months. He’ll also brief each department head on what the survey found about the department.

Reeb said he hoped the city would do another survey in 2007 and every two years thereafter. The survey in 2000 is thought to be the first time the city did an employee-wide survey. This year’s study cost about $20,000, Reeb said.

The city has done other broader surveys in the past. In 2002, the city sent out a survey in all of its water bills asking for general opinions about city government. The 1,700 folks who responded generally gave the city a thumbs-up for user-and-business friendliness issues. But that same year, the city hired a private consulting firm to interview 29 anonymous community leaders who said the city’s planning processes were broken, that City Hall lacked a “can-do” attitude, that ordinances were inconsistently enforced and that the city’s passion and diversity paralyzed the city’s decision-making ability.