Mayor Grover Robinson and the City of Pensacola management team participated in a leadership retreat Friday, Nov. 1, part of the city’s long-term strategic plan to enhance employee engagement and develop leadership skills.
During the retreat, the city’s leadership team learned about ways to achieve consistent excellence as an organization, which in turn helps create a team of engaged and motivated employees to better serve the city as a whole. The management team also participated in team building exercises at Adventures Unlimited in Milton during the retreat to help strengthen employee relationships.
“The reason everything works here in the City of Pensacola is there are 800 men and women who are dedicated to serving this community,” Mayor Robinson said. “What we can do to invest in them and make them better leaders, to make their team better leaders, to make sure that services are more efficiently being provided – those are all good things. We think at the end of the day, they will provide a better quality of service, and we believe we need to invest in our employees and make them better leaders.”
The city conducted an employee engagement and satisfaction survey in May 2019, which indicated an interest from employees in enhancing training and further developing leadership skills.
Quint Studer was the keynote speaker at the retreat, addressing topics including sustaining organizational excellence, improving employee retention, implementing measurable goals and engaging employees.
“Performance is about consistency,” Studer said during his presentation Friday, adding that the workplace structure should be more of a team than a family. “Teams love each other, teams support each other, teams cover each other’s back – but teams also hold each other accountable.”
Dr. Chris Reilly with Sperduto & Associates led a panel discussion on employee engagement, providing an opportunity for city leadership to share how they are implementing changes based on the employee engagement survey.
Sperduto & Associates, an Atlanta-based firm of corporate psychologists and management consultants that works with organizations throughout the country to help their employees be more engaged, satisfied and productive at work, conducted the city’s employee engagement survey earlier this year.
City leadership who participated in the retreat will take lessons learned and communicate them with employees, along with communicating new performance metrics for city employees that will focus on the the long-term goal of service excellence and help ensure accountability for job performance. The new performance metrics will be implemented in December 2019.
“I’m committed to making the City of Pensacola the best it can be as an organization, which starts with dedicated, engaged employees,” Mayor Robinson said. “This retreat was a great opportunity for our leadership team to come together and learn about strategies we can use to continue working toward making Pensacola a ‘City of Excellence.'”