John Barrand - Modernizing Performance Management in the Public Sector
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Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data, and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by Salary.com, your source for data, technology, and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now, here are your hosts, David Teretsky and Dwight Brown. Hello and welcome to the HR Daylabs podcast. I'm your host, David Teretsky, alongside my trusted co-host friend, BFF.

From salary.com, Dwight Brown. Dwight, how are you? David Teretsky. I am wonderful this morning. How are you doing? Wow. Well, I will not reach that bar. I'm okay. We'll get you to that bar by the end. Well, we will because today we have with us a very special guest. John Barron, how are you? I'm going to go with happy. Oh, well, there you go. That's pretty good. Yeah. John, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and the reason why we're so excited to talk to you today? Yeah.

Sure. I think the main reason is because you've got an avid listener who's excited to spend some time with what I'd call local HR celebrities. So, yeah, correct. Flattery. Flattery to start the time together. So I'm a...

One thing I love about my introduction is I'm a full-fledged HR practitioner. Excellent. And currently serving as the chief HR officer for the state of Utah, the executive branch cabinet member for Governor Cox. We've got a unique two weeks coming up. I know this is time dated, October 24th, but national election and governor going for his

his reelection as well. It's been wonderful. I moved to Utah seven years ago. Don't have any family here. Don't really have a real reason to stick around. Have since settled in, married a British woman who's itching to get back to the UK as soon as possible. But we're having a lot of fun serving Utah. It's a wonderful place to spend some time. I like the West. I

western part of the United States and we're just enjoying our time together. That's awesome. I would add the great state of Utah which has so many beautiful and wonderful things and now has a brand new hockey team which we're very proud of. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah, really. Yeah, your state, Dwight, lost the hockey team and Utah gained the hockey team.

And I can give some professional background. I spent a decade in Chicago coming up through, through the HR function. And I was there for the three Stanley cups. So I,

I do have a favorite goalie and David, it's not you. Oh, that hurts.

to see Salt Lake Valley and the state of Utah warm up to the ice. Absolutely. And, you know, that's one of the beautiful things about hockey is it creates community and it is a, and you wouldn't think so because it's like a very violent, very fast, very, you know, just, just,

There's a lot of collisions. It's a very fast sport, but what it does do is it brings kids into the conversation. It brings the community together and

And we've seen this happen in lots of cities that have adopted NHL teams. And I am just so proud of Utah for taking the team and for actually embracing it. That's wonderful. It teaches a lot about sacrifice. I'm sure I understand you still play. You probably have, what, 10 o'clock ice time, right? Like it's not convenient. So there's a lot of sacrifice that goes into building, particularly when there's such limited ice rinks in the communities. So it does teach a lot. And it's it's it's

it's been fun. It's been fun to watch and talk about locally. So we're enjoying our time for sure. Well, so John, before we get into our topic, which is going to be really cool, what's one fun thing that no one knows about John Barron? There's people that know this, but it will make me blush. So the, I'll quit in Tarantino. I'll tell you the ending. And then maybe back into some of the story here is I was on the same stages using the same vocal support, practicing my choreography in the same places, but,

as a small boy band in the same summer known as NSYNC. Wow. Oh, yeah. So they started out of Orlando in 1995. They had just released an album in Germany, and I was working at Disney World as a singer-entertainer. Oh, cool. And had a boy band myself that was nothing. I want to be very clear. We were in Disney World, and we would...

We would do the same stages as them a couple days later and whatnot because they came up – some of them came up through Disney. So usually some of my – I've scrubbed the internet and all physical CDs. But every now and again, a white elephant gift amongst my group of friends pops in. And suddenly it's a CD of my boy band from 1995. That's great. As a white elephant gift. That's cool. There's still a few out there, but –

Again, I was not as talented, but it's always fun to brag about and say, hey, I was maybe two steps away from being the next. But of course, I wasn't. So what was the name of your band? We were called Cloud Nine. Okay. And we really focused on, of course, I was the bass man and bassist.

And we, we really focused on 50, 60 medleys. So we performed in the country of America and Epcot. Yeah. Um, right. They have those walking performers and then we would do stage performances about three nights a week. And it was, it was a great time for us. That's awesome. Right. That's cool. Yeah, it was fun. Um,

People assume that the talent has come with me, but no, that was all engineered through. So you're saying it was all heuristics from all the technology that you used? I started singing by trading. I would mow my vocal coach's yard.

Cause I didn't have like, I was like, Hey, I don't think I like this enough to pay for it, but like, right. And then it just became a thing. And, um, so, and I was definitely the weak link, the, the people that I sang with, the group that I sang with all three of them went to university, um, on scholarship. And I was, I guess I was like, I guess I'll just go to college. Like there was no offers coming my way. I was, I think you're being hard on yourself, but so do you still perform?

Absolutely not. There isn't a bone in my body that makes me want to do that. I was going to say at the end, we're going to ask you to sing a little medley. We'll all try. Or dance. Did you dance along with it? Yes. Just like the board of bands? Yes. We had a hired choreographer. It was a really silly time. And again, I can blush pretty quick thinking about it, but like...

It definitely helped with securing dates. It definitely helped. Sure. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun for a few years. So we have a celebrity in many ways on our podcast today. Let's be careful. Let's be careful. He's the head of HR for the state of Utah, but he's also a singer and dancer from Cloud9.

Now I'm going to be combing the internet looking for that. Exactly. We're going to have to find those little nuggets of brilliance from John. They're out there somewhere, I guarantee it. We're going to send it off to America's Got Talent, so you'll be on there very shortly. Let's go. Today's topic is one near and dear to a lot of our hearts, and it's modernizing performance management, but with a twist in the public sector.

And we here at salary.com have a lot of clients in the public sector, but we don't spend a lot of time talking about the public sector on the podcast, which is definitely going to change today. But we also talk a lot about how to improve HR processes. So I'm really excited to get going to talk about this.

So our first question, John, is what's the big difference in your experience between the public and private human resources world? Yeah, good question. For additional context, because I know my intro, I stayed more personal. I did come up through the private sector ranks. After getting my MBA, I

Started at Procter & Gamble, and I'll likely refer to that through some of this conversation. Conglomerate that had 25 $1 billion brands in it in 2006, right? Wow. I got my start in HR in opening restaurants through undergrad. And through undergrad...

Most people take a serving job, right? I was done singing and dancing. And then I became a server to earn some date money, right? Yeah, good enough at that, that they promoted me to a bartender. And then you become a bartender. And...

Then they promote you to like, hey, you want to be a manager, right? The skill set often doesn't equate. I said, no, I don't want to be a manager, but I can help with something. And I ended up opening up 21 restaurants in about 18 months with an organization out of Austin, Texas called Fired Up Incorporated. And so it was a lot of fun. I hired 3,000 people by the time I went to grad school. Of course, that lended into private sector. So restaurant scene, Procter & Gamble, private equity in Chicago, all

All of this is private based, right? Capitalism, pure capitalism. Let's make some money. Right. Right. And then you come into the public sector of which and I mean this the nicest way every time I say I wasn't even in the country for the last election. I was courting my my now British bride in the UK. I spent quite a bit of covid in other countries between Costa Rica and UK and.

So when I got a call from the governor of Utah to come run his organization, I said, I don't think I'm your guy. I don't think this is going to work for me. I actually had just accepted a job offer, first time I ever had to renege in my life. And he goes, come, I'll give you a long leash. We want to modernize state government. And that's such a fun cliche word to say. But the first thing I learned, and to directly answer your question out of that context, is

The amount of stakeholders that you have to bring along in any conversation is massive. So I've prepped board decks. I've reported up to CEOs. I've engaged with CFOs. But I have the Utah State Legislature is 104 elected officials, and they are my board of rector, and they are my CFO. And anytime I want to progress a concept, I either have to have 104 people,

quick conversations with 104 leaders. And then the other stakeholders are, we have three and a half million citizens. Now, not all of them are checking in on what the executive branch HR team is doing, but we have very public committee meetings where I go defend my recommendations. And in that comes the unions, associations, and then state employees. So I have really two massive

overpowering stakeholders to invest time in the legislature. They control the finances, right? That's my CFO. And then I actually have to engage pretty heavily with the workforce, which I'm not suggesting is the wrong outcome, but it's a really different outcome in the public sector is I have to convince them because they can then help convince their legislature to vote for the things that I typically try to make law. It's fascinating.

And I know I don't get long winded, but I also want to state like our legislature is wonderful. And the 22,000 employees I serve, I think they get a bad rap. Public sector gets a bad rap. I spend too many nights out with the highway troopers or walk in the correctional facility or spend a time with...

People who place, you know, abused children at family services, like we have wonderful talent in the public sector. I think bureaucracy and politics typically undermines that strong performance. And I think that's one of the reasons I was so attracted to this job was try to take a swipe at improving that for our employee base. It's been a wonderful opportunity for sure.

One thing I want to probe on with you around this is that the world of public sector has dealt a lot with transparency, whereas now the private sector has to deal with transparency. That's a concept, and I know that doesn't go to the core of what we're going to be talking about today, but it's kind of getting to the public versus private concept.

We're now dealing with this in the private sector. You mentioned that you have a lot of stakeholders. Is transparency really a big deal in the world of public sector? As you mentioned, you have 104 legislators you have to talk to, you have to talk to the unions. Do you think that that's something that we can overcome in the private sector given that

You have to deal with that every day. It's a fair question because as this became very critical in the HR space, it's been really fun to kick back and say, oh, check. Because as an example, we post all of our jobs come posted with the salary. When I read the thought pieces on whatever newsletter I subscribe to, I am so grateful that we are in the space where we've already delivered that. Now,

I think it was because we were trying to share a value proposition that wasn't as comfortable as the private sector. But I will say transparency now, I work pretty heavily with our head of tech to drive what should be more transparent. We actually just stood up a privacy office. We have 32 bills last year related to AI and data protection in that space. So we have to be on the cusp of that.

where capitalism can run, run, run and clean it up with a lawsuit. We have a moral obligation to be in front of those. And I'm probably not the best to speak to it, but it's been fun to be ahead of transparency, but also be informed on what data privacy looks like. And it's such a narrow opportunity for success. But yeah, we definitely have to own everything publicly. And

It doesn't keep me up at night as it does with some of my peers and colleagues in the HR space. So everybody, if you want to get in touch with John to get more opinion about the transparency, it's john.bamking. Well, transparently, you can find my email and my phone number. You can find how much I make very easily. It is all out there. That's for sure.

Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by salary.com. Now back to the show.

Let's pivot a little bit to the differences in the HR processes, though, between public and private. And we're going to start talking about performance management and how that's different between public and private. Yeah, let's go. So when I came in, this modernization conversation in the lunches and the meetings with Governor Cox at the time was amazing.

One of the table stakes for HR in modernizing the employee experience, and I was really grateful that he would use those. Every one of those is a buzzword. I'm really grateful he used them because at least it let me know that my leader was thinking like that. And I walked in my first day and I said, hey, team. And by the way, I didn't, of course, interview with any of my downline. So they were meeting me for the first time as a cabinet member. Great. Hey, can I see performance ratings? And they said, yeah.

They said, oh, we don't really have performance ratings. I said, well, can I see performance valuations? I want to know what team I'm inheriting. They're like, oh, we don't really do that. In fact, the last 13 years, we've been on somewhat of a pass fail, and we've only had, they showed me like three fails in 13 years. I have a team of 140. Wow.

And I was like, oh, okay. So this was the crux of what I think most people assume happens in state government or government is, okay, complacency is rewarded or tenure is important. And my leaders, including those 104 legislature, the president of the house and the speaker, right? All the big titles you need to drop were refusing to budge on compensational adjustments because of that problem.

That vibe, that feeling, or that aura that was put on said, well, we can attempt to stand up, right? Private sector performance management, right?

But I'm going to need some promises from you. So we did a quick audit. We used the state auditor. And they came to me. I had no idea what I was doing. It was just bulky. I didn't know who I was offending. I didn't know who I was. And probably for the better the first year. Now, four years in, I should be a little smarter. But they brought me an audit from 2010 and said, hey, before we do this audit in 2021, can you read this? Oh, my God. And this was 11 years prior.

And they said, we had made recommendations for how to increase performance management in state government. At the time, state government had solved, we had three issues. One, we had a manager and leadership competency issue, meaning because no one was rewarded or even the focus of performance was not important, no one was doing it, right? So why would you develop that skill if no leader was telling you to do it? And I'm making some really broad stereotypes here.

You know, I served 21 cabinet members, right? I served the governor. I served a lot of stuff. Not everyone thinks like this, but the bureaucracy had gotten gotten involved with it. Yeah. We had an archaic process, meaning pass fail was at best. And you have to think about things like sworn officers. Think about the correctional facility. How are you going to introduce performance management in a punitive nature like that?

What are you going to do in that space, right? So that was what we were up against. And the third was we had a very limiting system. We had stood up our own internal HRIS in 2008. And it wasn't even off of a DOS-based program. It was off of a beta DOS-based program. So we were still using a beta DOS-based. So I went and said, I need a couple things. And the audit showed me from 2010 that only 8% of our managers were getting trained.

In any facet. So if you just want to blanket, use the word train, what were they? They showed us that 18%. And then only 14% of our managers were actually using any sort of record of performance management. We have 3,800 managers. So we ran the audit again in 2021, almost the exact same thing. Um,

in 2021, my first year here, 30% of managers got trained. So from 8% to 30%. But the record system, the record keeping system, performance management had gone from 14% to 16%. So not nominal change. Nothing had really... The problem statement was threefold. One, we

We need to equip managers, right? Middle management with the ability to actually lead and manage. We need to solve the process. I need to introduce a stronger process of performance management and we need to get a bigger system. So that first legislative session, I went in and said, hey, legislature, can we abandon COLA? Stop giving us the entitled COLA and whatever payroll you set aside. So if it's 3%, give it to me and pay for performance.

And I had never seen a more targeted marketing campaign as to attack that from our... No one wanted... Because I hadn't stood anything up. And I'm telling 22,000 employees, I want to abandon what you've been given your whole life and move to a performance management process. Wait, you're taking my guaranteed 3%? Swear word, yeah, I'm taking your guaranteed 3%. We're not playing this game anymore, right? Yeah.

And they didn't know me from Adam. I was the private sector villain. Right. Why would you ever, right? Right. So the first pull was securing two other things. One, I asked for a million dollar of headcount. So about six heads.

To improve manager training. I said, if you give me six heads, I'll make sure that every manager is trained in the state within a year. Right. And we'll stand up important principles. The second thing was I asked for $23 million to buy a new HRIS. I wanted to go buy off the box. That's a really unsexy span for people who need to get reelected every two years. Yeah. And they did it. Exactly.

They did it. Yeah, but if they knew that you were running a system built on a beta of DOS. A beta DOS. What is that, like 1938? Yeah, we got it. So of the three things I needed to progress, I had two of them in the bag. I had now training in the way, and I had my system set up. So I took a year to kind of get those moving, and then went back and said, hey, let's start exchanging COLA for performance management dollars.

I had to roadshow it. Even in my own team, I brought my 26, 28 managers in and said, all right, let's talk about this. And the spear of performance management, HR was like, now we're good. If we have the option to opt in or opt out, can we? And I was a villain. Now, again, these are great people. And the majority of those people, we now laugh about those conversations three years later.

But we had to take a really solid look at what the lay of land was. It was as unpretty as you could ever have expected. The words innovation and agility and performance management were about as helpful as the Peloton that's been sitting in my basement for two years. I hang my clothes on it. That's it. That's all. So we didn't know how to flex that muscle. I can only imagine...

to the uphill battle because you're, you're, I mean, let's face it, the, we all get into our ruts of things and you've got people who have been with the government for 25 years where they haven't known anything like that. And so, you know, coming in, being the villain and you've got to innovate on top of that. You got to layer in technology along with that. That's a

I had no idea how to do it. And I think that's one of the issues I find with most HR professionals is we expect perfect and we let that become the enemy of good, right? That's a great quote for getting things started. And we knew we just need to get started. Correspondingly, a lot of times you'll hear public sector refer to, well, we're underpaid relative to our position. And I wanted to go prove that as well. And I think this will speak to a group from salary.com or former consultants in the space that

When I came in, I started at Procter & Gamble in a comp role. I loved it. Expatriate compensation. Man, it was fun. And comp specialists, comp managers have a special place in my heart.

We only had external matches for one in every four roles in 2021. So I doubled down my internal investment on what comp matches will look like. The end of that story is as of now, we just re-released in July of 24. We have three of every four jobs are in a match. So I can match to 87% of my population.

And I was able to use that to tell a very compelling story is, hey, you tell me, legislatures, governor, that you want to be 10% below market medium.

Well, I can now tell you that 23% of our population is more than 30% below market, right? And they had never been informed these stories because we were really good at compliance. We were really good at institutional rigidity, but we weren't good at telling stories. So I'm in the background pushing external alignment, right? There's only, I believe there's only two levers for comp, external market comparison and internal performance management. Those should be the two main levers for moving comp forward. Right.

And I silently and quietly attacked the external markets and really engaged in that space. We ended up investing. I know the end story. In the last four years, the average state employee in the state of Utah has gotten a 29% increase. We've outpaced the private sector here in Utah by about eight or nine percentage points. They've all kind of averaged around 20% over the last four fiscal years. And it's because we had a really...

poorly treated workforce. And they did not trust that standing up performance management was going to go the way we want it to. So we had a lot of things in those first 18 months to solve for.

It was fascinating. It was a fascinating lift. We just got through our first year. And maybe I can get in the space where I can tell you what the first year, we're only a year in. So in 2021, we ran the law. It became a law. Everyone was worried about it becoming a law quickly. They typically take root the next fiscal year. We pushed it a full fiscal. So it didn't become law.

performance management and pay for performance didn't become a law till July 1, 2023, which meant we just wrapped up in, in, in 2024, our first year of performance management. Right. And pretty pleased with some of the outcomes, but also helps give us direction as to where we should go. So I do have a question. How did you sell performance management? I mean, you, you're going through the big change and you,

You're saying we need to do this. Yeah. What were the biggest selling points that you had? Because I think it ties back directly to just selling the same processes within companies, too. So I'm fascinated by how you got there. We...

2021, 2022, of course, we haven't laid the context of what was happening in the world at the time, right? Yeah. So I think there was really two selling points to two groups of people who are the youngest state in the union by about three years. But our workforce, my workforce, my 22,000 people workforce is actually skews seven years older than the average person.

the workforce average in, in the state of Utah. We're an older workforce. So we knew that we were about to start turning on the talent, right? We, the, the boomer generation, it really is happening. We, I read that every day on workforce analytics. So I knew we were going to have a workforce problem. I knew that the, the younger generation or the newer generation typically turns over every three to four years. So I said, we have to become competitive as,

as quick as possible. We were wrestling with return to office, which certainly was leading to massive amounts of attrition in some of our professional services organizations.

And we honestly had a mess. And I would go to the legislature and say, do you want tenure or do you want performance? Right. So we have a very positive incentive structure for those who stay a long time. You know that you may have never worked for public sector, but you know that if you stay a long time, you retire with some good money. Of course. Yeah. I started abandoning those principles to say, let's solve the workforce problem.

The second thing I did is I went to my actual employees and I'm telling you, we road showed it up from Logan to St. George. We went all over the place and I put myself in front of it as a chief HR officer and said, you all work with a performer that you, someone that you don't like. You all work with someone who makes your world harder. We have three pass fails or three fails in the last 13 years of my organization. I assure you there's better way for you to get better at your job.

I kept saying, I want to make poor performers uncomfortable. And I would get amens. Amen. I'd go to the associations. I'd go to the Fraternal Order of Police and say, we agree with that. Well, the only way to make poor performers uncomfortable is to hold them more accountable, right? And so many people expect performance management. I think performance management exists for three reasons. One, to align mission and vision, right? Two, to allow managers to actually manage. And three, growth, right?

Right. Growth for the employee. I just I didn't see any of those existing inside the public sector. And so I would change. I would use one of those three criteria depending on who I was talking to. The employees loved hearing that they could have growth again. They were so browbeat. And we've been put in such a box as to what public sector is. And when you start talking to them about growth opportunities.

They are way in on it. Sure. Well, guess what I need to do? I need to understand what growth you need through performance metrics and performance management. And they slowly started buying in. So we won with them in order for legislators to actually pass the bill. John, did you feel the need to be able to help with things like you were talking about before with training and with reskilling and with upskilling so that, you know, it was...

We see the gaps that exist or we want to see the gaps that exist in the performance management, but we're going to help you. We're going to solve those problems and we're going to give you the skills necessary to be able to do that. It's the first time that I think a lot, and again, I'm only four years in, that I think state employees watch the exchange afterwards.

actually be credible or beneficial for them. Now, they've exchanged sick leave for health insurance on the other side of retirement. They've watched that get diminished. They're used to every time there's a conversation about their

about their dollars. They're about, they're used to it being diminished. So when I went out and said, no, I've secured six trainers, six trainers for 3,800, by the way. Right. We've done 60% of our training in person. Right. Like we are like, wait, you're investing on us. Oh, you're standing up a talent mobility team. Wow. While you're buying a payroll system that I can actually finally clock in on my, my phone. Wow. You guys are throwing us a few shillings here. This is great. So, so,

I think the trust that happened between one side of the executive, right, the legislative branch and the executive branch.

And I think it became really imperative for my mid-level managers to see that. And again, I had to walk the halls at the correctional facility. I went out on the midnight rides with our police officers and said, teach me why you're so jaded. And once they started trusting the exchange, because this loudmouth, arrogant chief major officer, right, really made some promises. And when we actually started delivering, we just gave out $43 million in performance management dollars. And they're like,

This is new for us. We're hiring. We're heightening our expectations for you. And this is how. Right. So did the police actually have you cuffed in the back of the car or did they transport you to the sheriff's office or to the jail? No, that was after one of his boy band concerts. But I'm pumped. Good job.

The state troopers are made with different DNA than I am. You know, we've gone out on DUI nights. I've gone out on adult probation and parole violation nights where we go arrest the bad guys. They put me in a bulletproof vest and they say, hey, don't get out of the car. And trust me, I don't. Like, they are good and great men and women who have far more DNA for bravery than I ever will. And we are.

I'm so grateful that there are people who choose to do that job. Oh, my gosh. And they deserve to make more than all three of us combined at any. Oh, my God. Yeah. And the correctional officers, too, and the firefighters and the ambulance. I mean, all the first responders are just such a brave, unbelievable group of humans. It's wonderful to serve them. And they came back to this performance management bit. They would come back and say, hold on. I, as a trooper.

You're going to reward me now. What's the value proposition for, as a trooper, if I have to give 100 speeding tickets a week...

I meet that criteria. No, no, no. I'm not talking about transactional punitive rewards. We went and taught the correctional facility. We just moved the prison together collectively up near the Salt Lake airport and the troopers and all the, right, the tax commission. We taught them, we want to focus on the how, not the what. And that was really informative for them to deliver core values. Governor Cox teaches 19 ways he sees the world. We deconstructed it and built it back together with

value-based performance management. So we, I'm really heavy on the how and not the what, and that seems to be taking. Now, of course,

we can challenge how you evaluate the what, right? So in the coming years, the only data I have for you after the first year is that we've checkmarked it. 87% of our managers have been trained. Do I know the quality of the training? I don't yet. I can tell you that 82%, we have a requirement for quarterly reviews to happen. That's 88,000 quarterly reviews needed to happen. We were 82% of those were met. Like I know that we're doing quarterly. Do I know the value of the quarterly review? I don't yet. But

But I can tell you that we're really aggressively attacking calibration of goals, meaning each individual makes their own goals. And when I go to lunch with the Board of Pardons and Parole or when I take a meeting with UDOT and all of their engineers, right, we're talking about the how. And it's really lifted the workforce. We've seen an uptick.

In fact, I have the data. I'm sorry. I'm going to get distracted. I want to make sure I get it to you accurately. We've seen a 5% uptick in sufficient recognition, a 5% uptick in the employee view of professional growth. So employees have responded. Now that they've seen what it is, they've responded and told us, yeah, like we like this and we want more of it. I just don't think we had trusted them with this. And we didn't have the framework to your point.

There wasn't a training team that existed to help them. There wasn't an avenue to reward good performers and

All we had to do was teach correct principles and let them govern themselves. Right. And it's become really helpful. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast. A free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind.

Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today. So let's talk about data for a moment, John, because data will help them and will help us contextualize.

How do you bring data into the conversation with all these stakeholders and how do you prove it? You know, how do you show them the ROI? You know, what kind of training or what kind of storytelling are you doing on the data side to be able to, as you mentioned, you know, these 5% upticks, they're great, they're progress.

How do you give contextual or how do you contextualize these improvements for not just the legislature, but for all your stakeholders? Yeah, I have focused on two right now with probably a third in motion. One, I'd call it the poor performer funnel, meaning we know that managers are actually acting more quickly on poor performance because there's a requirement to be in a room with them quarterly.

We had a 90% increase in our formal performance improvement plans in one year. A 90% increase. Now, that's really easy to vilify. And if you're aggregating, take that comment and say, the head of HR for the state of Utah sees a 90% uptick in PIPs. That's a good thing. Now, I don't necessarily see it as a good thing. And by the way, almost 100% of those are happening within the first year of hire. So we hire 2,200 people a year.

So guess what's happening is we're evaluating talent a little more quickly now. I got to be careful because I'm not yet to the point where I can evaluate the quality of that. We have 3,800 managers, right? I can't get into every one of those just yet. We have the highest case log. So when my ER team, when my legal team gets, hey, can you review this termination? We've had the highest tick mark of, is there previous documentation for this conversation?

Right. That we've ever had. So, and I'm talking about percent of a flow that comes to us, but also total count. So you're asking me data informed questions that help give us directional direction.

Right. Are we directionally heading the right way? Yeah. A lot of this is still very surface level. I own that. I'm not I can't get you to quality of hire yet. I can't. Right. But I can tell you that every signal that we need to see is directionally moving towards stronger performance management in the poor performance funnel. Right.

They're acting sooner. They're documenting more, more appropriately and making it easier for them to either to exit or PIP their employees. And some of that's even archaic, right? Like I acknowledge that when I engage with my HR teams or HR colleagues across the country, you know, a lot of organizations are moving away from annual performance reviews. They're moving away from PIPs themselves, right? They're modernizing in different ways.

This is where we are right now. I think the second one would be employee satisfaction. So we can definitely, we use the organizational health index. We send out seven surveys across the employee lifecycle. They're usually about four or five questions on the way in, six months in, three years in, on the way out. And then we annually survey them. We have 13,000 of our employees respond this year. And we've definitely seen the uptick, like I said, in professional growth, meaning their goals are,

Are actually helping them grow. We've seen the uptick in sufficient recognition. So not just money, but also how we express gratitude as leaders. And we've seen an uptick in positive experiences in the workforce. That was, by the way, with the underlay of return to office. Right. And how devastating that's been to a lot of the workforce. Yeah.

We're seeing upticks that, again, are outpacing, according to my private sector colleagues. We're winning because we're winning with the workforce. We've also seen our applicant flow increase. People are hearing that if you're a good performer, there's a place for you. Now, the third thing I think that I'm going to really wrestle with, and maybe we do this again in 18 months, would be I really want to figure out the quality of the conversation. I really want to challenge what

what's happening in those quarters of reviews. And I really want to get in that space. So again, quality of hire, quality of conversation, quality of termination even, right? And my team is stewing on it. We just hired some data analytics team. I'm standing up a talent mobility team in the next eight months. Excellent. So we can internally share talent across our 21 agencies, but I can't speak to it yet, but I know directionally that's where I'm going. John, you're having the, what I'll call mature conversations. Yeah.

that every HR department should have about how do we keep ourselves sustained? How do we make sure our stakeholders understand we're doing the right things? And how do we make sure that the employees understand that we're trying to take care of them? So it sounds like you're on the right path and you're doing the right things. And this seems like

It's going to be a really cool journey for not just you, but for every state employee in the great state of Utah. Yeah, I know that I use I language a lot because I'm really proud of the work that I and my team are doing. But when I really think about it, as an HR professional, I'd rather be a business leader than an HR leader. Although I'm affectionately in love with all the HR nerds in the world, I think we need more of them.

Speaking our language.

We're trying to figure out, is our middle management too rich? Not too rich in compensation, but what's that ratio? Should it be one manager to every five direct reports? Right now it's one to 2.2. Are we a little fat in middle management? Or how do we unpack that frozen middle? So it's not just an HR process, but now I have a business leader saying, hey,

Now I have flexibility to have bigger conversations that could potentially save taxpayer dollars, which seems to be really important, or could actually move the structure of my organization. And that's a really fun place to be in there. That's not a politically driven conversation. That's an operationally efficient driven conversation. I love putting my leaders in that space. Now we're in the early stages. Nothing will probably happen, right? And it will get political as we go down that road, but

For a leader to say, hey, can I chew on this with you because of what you've done? That makes it, that's the TED Talk for me. That's bringing HR to the table and making you part of the business. Yeah. It's a lot of fun to serve here. It's a lot of fun.

And so I think what we're going to have to do, John, is bring you back in a year and see how did everything work? Granted, Governor Cox will have won another election, right? It's only a couple of weeks away. But then, you know, also, you know, how did things progress and where are things going? Let's do it, whether it's formally, informally, I...

One thing I don't think HR professionals, particularly in the public sector, do is I don't think they tell their story. Very compelling. That's why you don't have a lot of public sector people come speak with you. Now, I believe I'm a loner. I'm going to be a public sector guy for a few more years. Like, I like it, but I will head back to private sector. But every time I speak at a conference, I always ask public sector, private sector. And it's typically 25 to 30 percent of the public sector raise their hand. They're out there and they're in these meetings and they're in these conversations.

I just wish more of them would speak up. And I really want to galvanize public sector to be more at the forefront of what these tricky conversations can be like. Innovation happens when you have scarcity of resources. If there was scarcity of resources in spades, it's in government.

Like we don't, we don't overspend, right? Like, so we have to innovate in really creative ways. And the talent within the public sector, particularly in HR is tremendous. And I'm so grateful to be counted amongst them right now. So bring me back. Let's have, keep the conversation going and let's set up that forum. Awesome. John, thank you so much. It's nice to spend some time with you. And thanks for putting up with me for a little while. No outro singing though. Dwight, you're going to be baritone. John will be...

Very good. Well, thanks for your time. Thank you very much, Sean. Thank you, Dwight. Thank you. Appreciate it. You guys have a good rest of your day. Thank you all for listening. Take care and stay safe. That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the episode, please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week and stay tuned for our next episode. Stay safe.