2025 Episode Replay: How Port Moody Turns Employee Feedback Into Real Culture Change - with Marta Taylor

You can't really change someone's perception on the value of these things. Maybe that's not a popular opinion, but I think people have a view on this kind of thing and I don't really think it's about buy and it's more about having those leaders that do believe in it, really leveraging their voice so making sure that they're on side, they understand the value, that they can communicate to their peers at the leadership table, that they have the messaging, that they understand the process and can help support it. Welcome to Voice Activated, the podcast dedicated to unlocking the power of employee feedback. I'm Sean Fitzpatrick, founder of Telemap and your host. In each episode, we'll dive into real world examples and best practices, as well as some lessons learned from employee surveys, pulse checks, focus groups, 360s and more. If people are at the heart of your business, you're in the right place. Expect open conversations, practical advice, inspiring stories from companies that are getting it right, and some reflections from those who've hit a few bumps along the way. Tune in, listen up, and let's activate the voice of your employees. In municipalities and local government, change is often viewed as something handed down from the top. But in my work with municipalities, I've seen at times a different approach. Where culture change doesn't always come from a mandate from above, it can come from within. You know, by some, someone who may not be in the boardroom every day. Today's guest reminds us that leadership can come from anywhere in an organization, particularly when it's grounded in trust, listening and aligning action with the direction of the organization. Marta Taylor is a manager of strategic initiatives for the City of Port Moody, where she leads everything from corporate planning to diversity, equity, inclusion, indigenous relations, and accessibility. Her work really lives at the crossroads of culture, systems and community, where she's built a reputation for for turning employee voice into real operational shifts. In this episode, we talk about how the City of Port Moody approaches employee feedback and change and what it takes to keep employee listening open and honest and not just a check the box type exercise. If you're leading or involved in driving culture change inside today's municipalities, or any complex organization for that matter, this one's for you, Marta. Welcome to Voice Activated. Thank you so much for having me. I'm going to jump right in and as we go through this, we'll probably get a bit of a sense of who you are and how you approach some of this this work. But just tell me a little bit about your current role at the city and Previous roles maybe, and how you got sort of involved in the employee survey and how it fits into the responsibilities you've had. So I've been with the city for about the last seven years and my role has evolved from being a corporate planning advisor to a manager of corporate planning to now manager of strategic initiatives. But the entire time really, you know, I've been supporting the executive and leading strategy and corporate planning at the city of Port Moody, which means I often act as a connector between big picture goals and on the ground realities. So as you mentioned, my portfolio has included a very wide range of topics and usually they're the ones that are kind of cross organizational in nature. It's interesting you don't often see this role or I haven't seen it as much in municipalities or maybe there are there, but I just haven't seen them involved as much in the survey side. So I think that's interesting. Yeah, it's been a really great opportunity for me to be able to be involved in this because it is a big interest area of mine and I do think that it's often nested within human resources and I have been working very closely with that department. But it's been really great to have that leadership opportunity in this area. It's an interest of yours. What sort of drew you towards employee feedback, employee engagement or sort of in that area? What tweaked that interest? I really want to hear people's true thoughts and opinions. I don't like to sugarcoat things myself. And I think that sometimes we get caught in the perception of how things are going and unless we really hear from staff at all levels of the organization to ground truth that then we don't really know. And I really feel passionate about having a workplace and a workforce that's caring, leaned in thriving. And I think that hearing from our staff is one of the best tools we have in order to achieve that. Yeah, it can very powerful tool. Especially if it's done right. It could be a real powerful tool. Going back even before you're at the city, I noticed in one of your profiles you were, I think it was legal aid you worked at and you were involved with lawyer engagement, which I don't know if that's around the same sort of thing, which is historically, lawyers are probably one of the challenging groups to them and doctors, they seem to be in the same bucket around, around understanding sort of what drives and motivates them. So you've been involved with this for even previous to joining the city in terms of understanding? Yeah. And I think it is something that goes across my time and my career is just trying to really understand what's happening on the ground for people. And you know, instead of constantly running into the same issues, let's figure out what's at the root of it. And then by hearing voices from whoever our clients are, whether it's our staff or lawyers or whoever we're working with, our stakeholders, being able to create structural change from what we hear on the ground. I guess I'm wondering because you've been doing this for a while then, you know, here and then even at previous organizations, has your view of surveys evolved at all since you maybe started doing that? What you did and how they've changed, have the thinking around how you approach them or think about them changed or evolved? Honestly, not really. Like I've always had that employee voice or stakeholder voice as being really central to shaping structural change in the workplace. So I've always just really cared about that and wanting to see that materialize through surveys and then the action that follows. Yeah, the follow up part. So being involved with surveys, there's often that planning component and you know, getting things up and organized and stuff like that. Can you point to a couple of factors early on, before you even get into deploying it out, that just how you think about the planning stages, what are some key factors you consider or think are important when going through and setting up for feedback? So I think that it's important to consider the timing of the survey, thinking about why you're asking the questions in the survey, what is the intent that goes for a survey for any reason, whether that's a public survey or for your own staff. Because if you don't know what you're going to be doing with that information, then really you might be wasting everyone's time. So you have to be really clear on the why. And then I think just for the planning piece, thinking through all the different steps to get you from pre, during and post survey are really important so that you'd be well coordinated and have all the right people involved at the right time. Can you share a specific example? When you've done planning really well, or maybe not so well, where it made a difference, something, okay, we did this and boy, it really paid off in spades down the road or boy, we missed this and we should have thought about this earlier on because it's sort of come back to haunt us a little, little bit. Is there any specific examples you can think of or tools or techniques that you've used? Well, I think for when things have gone sideways. I'm sure a lot of organizations dealt with this, but with COVID that really took us off the track. We had done the survey in 2019 and we're ready to launch into our focus groups and start doing the follow up action. But then Covid happened and we didn't get back to it till 2022, which is a really long time obviously. But there were just so many other competing demands at that time. And you know, by the time we had the focus groups and determined the actions, there'd been so much lag. And I think that's hard for staff to feel like, you know, they provide their input and then they don't see action. And then the other challenge with that is our, you know, our next survey we did just recently at the end of 2024. And so between 2019 and 2024, it's really hard to assess what were the changes from like, was it from our actions or, you know, there's so many other variables that have changed over that time that it loses its power in terms of measuring the organization's actions. Some of the challenges with full surveys, when you survey a sort of a big survey with everybody in the organization, there could be quite a time lag. A year is even a long time. Two years is a long time. With COVID it really stretched out a lot of organizations, organization. So you lose that is that change we've improved, but is that because of we've done something or that's just because circumstances in the environment or culture or the staff has changed. So there's so many variables that the longer the timeline goes out, the less confident you are with, you know, yes, we've had an impact or no, no, this, this is outside of our control, it just happened type of thing. Have you thought about or have experienced, you know, using pulse surveys or quick follow up? Because we're seeing more and more of that, not just in Municip, in all organizations where they'll do still full surveys, but then they'll do quick pulses or follow up pulses in short, just to get a quick sense of okay, how's this going? What's, you know, what's working might be every six months, it could be every 12 months. What have you seen around that or have explored any of that? Yeah, I'm really interested in that idea. We haven't done that at the city of Port Moody, but I've certainly heard about it and you know, have considered how that might be implemented. One thing that we have been doing is at our all staff meetings, we have the opportunity for staff to either ask questions or provide feedback in an anonymous way. And those are addressed by the city manager in the meeting. And we've been pretty transparent about, you know, what those questions are, even if they're really hard questions, because that's one way we're trying to still get that moralized feedback between surveys. I like that. How does it work? Do they implement it through setting questions in, in advance or do they. Do you have some way that they do it in real time? Or what's, what's the process look like? Yeah, so we have staff go to an online form where they can submit their question or comment in an anonymous way. And then those are all collected. There's a deadline for when to submit those and. And then they're reviewed so that, you know, we can have a prepared answer, have, get the information we might need from other leaders on the topic. And to be able to bring that information back to the all staff meeting, that's great to supplement. Sort of a full survey is just to get that ongoing because it really is a dialogue. Right. A survey's just one step in the process. You're collecting data, but then part of it is back and forth collecting it, giving feedback, asking again, giving feedback, and just using it as a catalyst for discussion with staff to really open up and try to understand what their voice is and how to improve the organization. So I like that. That's a good idea. You know, when thinking about sort of surveys and whether it's false or false, how do you get that buy in from the leadership? The chief executive officer in cities would be the chief administrative officer typically, or city manager, depending on the structure. How do you ensure there's alignment and buy in? Because I know my experience with executives, there's all different views around the survey world. Like some. Oh, that's fluff. Some of it. Oh, we like it. It's really helpful. And there's quite a range of perceptions on how these things are used. They're not all like you, Marta, and that. Yeah, they really see the deep value in this. So I guess how do you go about doing that or how have you done that? Yeah, I guess my thought is you can't really change someone's perception on the value of these things. Maybe that's not a popular opinion, but I think people have a view on this kind of thing. And I don't really think it's about buy in. It's more about having those leaders that do believe in it really leveraging their voice. So Making sure that they're on side, they understand the value, that they can communicate to their peers at the leadership table, that they have the messaging, that they understand the process and can help support it. And we've been very lucky because at the city of Port Moody, I would say our leaders generally are very bought into this process and the value of hearing from our staff and are always keen to see the results. So fortunately, we haven't had, you know, deal with the challenge of leaders that are not very leaned into this. I like your focus, though, is make sure we focus in on, you know, the champions, the one that do behaviorally or explicitly show that, hey, this is something interesting to them and to really leverage them as opposed to sort of, you know, trying to win over the naysayers that might exist in the group and stuff like that. So thinking about questionnaire design, how do you think about questionnaire design? How do you think about the types of questions to ask? I know a lot of, you know, companies like us, and I know we do, we provide sort of a starting point around sets of questions and based on research and based on academic work, that's okay. These align with sort of the factors that drive engagement. But often there's other factors that are specific to an organization. Maybe you're going through a change or maybe you've implemented a new leader with a new set of values that they're trying to instill. How do you go about thinking about which questions to ask and also probably which ones not to ask, because whenever a survey comes to the front, you often get a lot of people coming out of the woodwork. Oh, we want to ask some of these questions and we want to ask some of those questions. So how do you balance, you know, figuring out what to ask, but also how to balance, you know, how to keep the, you know, the survey focused? Yeah, I think that we have really valued the questions that TalentMap provides for the benchmarking. And so we do err on the side of using those questions because, you know, it's just so valuable to be able to see how your responses stack up to other public sector organizations and where we have added questions or change the wording for the wording, where it just doesn't feel right in terms of our own organizational culture. Maybe the question is just worded in a way that we don't think will land for staff. And so we did tweak a few questions for that purpose. And then we did also add some questions around organizational changes because we have been going through quite a few changes And a lot of new strategies and plans for the public and internally. And we wanted to see how staff were feeling about how we planned for that change and how we communicate that change. So those were ones we added. I would say that I think we included too many questions this time around. There was some feedback around the length of the survey. So I think we have to balance our desire to see those benchmarked responses with ensuring that we don't have too lengthy of our survey for our staff. Yeah, survey length, it's an important balance. Right. Because you want to ask enough questions that you get a good sense of all of the things that you want to understand. It's like going to a physical at your doctor once a year and you get all those, you ask all those questions, you think, why are you asking those? That's not my problem. But its symptoms that often us. But we've also seen and we're moving to that too, shorter and shorter surveys where you've got, you can use a question to act as a proxy for two or three other questions that you might see in a longer survey. So yeah, that's sort of consistent with what we're seeing a lot of Miss Valley shorter and shorter survey to a point. You know, you still, you got to balance that information with brevity, but you don't want to be driving survey fatigue where employees are not interested in completing it when it's too long. You talked about benchmarking. It'd be interesting to understand because, yeah, leaders are often interested in benchmarks and okay, how do we stack up and so on. Can you point to any things like decisions or actions or anything you've done because of data in the benchmarking, either how you've prioritized decisions? You don't have to get into the specific of what the city did. But how did you use the benchmarks in your prioritization or in the decision making process? Well, I would say that the benchmarking really contextualizes the results. So there may be some questions where we looked at our percentages of favorable unfavorable and we thought, well, those don't look like the greatest scores. But then we see that it's on par with other organizations. And so that doesn't mean that we're not going to be working on that, but it does help us really understand the context and see that, well, maybe this is more of a trend across organizations. Maybe there's more at play than just what we're doing specifically as an organization on our own. And so I think it Helps us see what the urgency is to dealing with some of those topics, you know, in an area where we scored lower and we're also much below the benchmark. Well, that to me is a bigger red flag that that's something we need to work on and than when we're at the benchmark. That's good because you're right. Like there's a couple of things often you see in employee feedback, you've probably seen them over the years, things like information, communication. You know, employees always want more and different and that's a real hard nugget to crack because there's, there's top down community, there's bottom up, there's department, department or silo to silo, whatever. That's when compensation is another one, you know, oh, we want, you know, just pay them more and that'll solve. But it's funny, often organizations do see what you saw there is, oh, our comp scores are, you know, they seem low compared to all the other ones. Hey, but the benchmark's low. I guess we're not doing so bad. So we often see that type of thing and that, I like how that, have you used that to sort of help prioritize? Okay, how urgent is this versus yeah, we gotta be aware of it. We gotta be on top of it and align with it. But maybe it's not number one where we gotta really put a lot of effort and energy into it. So using that to compare, I think that's, that's interesting. We talked about all the good things about surveys. Have you ever had a survey initiative or part of a survey that just went sideways and just, you know, just didn't perform well or just, you know, failed or, or whatever. And how did you, how did you, what did you learn from that? If you had one of those, and you may not have, I don't know, it's just if you had one, it'd be interesting because often we always talk about what's working and, but it's also good to know what didn't work and why. You know, I haven't had a survey that's gone totally sideways, but I'm always learning with each iteration what went well, what didn't go so well. So you know, I would say for this last survey that we had, one thing that I realized could have helped is if we'd pre planned some of our communications and actions, you know, before the survey results got shared. Because especially when you're managing a diverse portfolio and there's always emerging new demands, it's really Easy for things to kind of fall to the side. And because I know how important it is to quickly follow up on those survey results and show staff that we are acting on it. I think that's one thing that, you know, I really learned this time around was to just be better organized ahead of those survey results, first going out so that we're all queued up with all the communication and next steps, not just in theory, but in really practical ways. Yeah, that's something I think, if I understand you right, we hear from a lot of organizations around closing the loop. So you do a survey, maybe you did the previous one, you're going out to do another one. And there often, there's a lot of initiatives that happen. Some of it informs a decision that speeds up the decision. Some of it informs a decision to slow down. And it's not always directly, oh, the survey said this. So we did that. Sometimes it is that, but sometimes it just. There's other things at play. And then the survey just sped up that decision because, wow, maybe we should move this along and we find some organic. For they forget to close the loop. It's like, oh, we did all of this because of what we heard last time. So we find that that's something that's a real challenge in terms. Because you're right, it's the next shiny object for managers and executives. And. And it's easy to get distracted because you think, okay, that's done. You've been working on it for a while. But bringing it back and making it prevalent or aware to employees about, hey, here's what we did, here's what's happened. Here's some initiatives and actions that seems to really have a big impact, but it's hard to do. It's not easy. You guys aren't the only ones. If that's sort of part of a challenge that. That you're dealing with. Well, one of the things that we do, because our results from the staff survey are followed up by the focus groups, and then there's recommendations that come out of those, and those really inform our organizational development plan. And so whenever we have any communication around a project or initiative that has a connection to that organization organizational development plan, we put that branding in the email as a way to remind staff that, you know, we are making progress on all these different initiatives and helping to make that linkage for them. That's good. Yeah, yeah. That connection all the way through, I think that's really good. And something organizations, I'd like to see them practice that more in Terms of branding, some of this process and feedback and then linking it all in. You talked a little bit about focus groups. Maybe tell me a little bit more on how you organize a focus group. Which ones do you get? Every. Everyone involved. Do you only select a few groups? How do you manage the dynamics in there? And then the other one you talked about is it informs and helps you plan your organizational development plan. Focus groups can be messy, right? You get all kinds of ideas and suggestions and how do you get that to a point of actually using that in a way that really is tactical and useful to be able to, able to drive effective plans. So last time around with our survey, we had two groups and they each had six sessions. So like an intro session, a closing session, and in the middle there were four sessions each on a driver. And so altogether there were 10 sessions that we held. What's the average size of a group? I think we had about 15 people. Okay, how long does it get? Two hours? An hour? Two and a half hours. We had like the intro and closing sessions were an hour and then the driver sessions were two hours. Okay. And it was comprised of staff at the union level because we really wanted to hear from that group and without having the necessarily any trepidation around sharing with managers in the room. And then for the closing session, you know, we brought back all of the what we'd heard throughout and the recommendations and had a list of all of those that were well articulated, recommendations summarized from everything that we'd heard. And then we did, you know, a bit of a dotmocracy style process for both groups to identify what they felt were the most important recommendations out of everything that they discussed. And then we brought in our city manager and our GM of corporate services and the different staff groups within that focus group presented their top recommendations to those leaders. And then the recommendations as a whole, I brought to our executive team, you know, showing the prioritization that the focus groups had done. And they reviewed all of those in detail. And it was also part of a day long workshop that we had for the executive to investigate, you know, their own ideas around what was needed to improve the organization, where the gaps were, where there were opportunities. And so combined with that employee focus group feedback and the executive's own analysis, there was a marriage of those two to really create our OD plan. That's fantastic. It's a really good structured way of approaching it. And I like the fact that at initial opening session you give them some time and then you brought the executive team or chief administrative manager in because there's always that business lens you gotta put onto it. Some of those are, oh, these are great ideas, and it's good for the employees. These, which is important, but you also have to put that other lens on. Okay, how do we make this happen in the business? Is this the right thing for the business, too? So getting both of those lenses, I think is really good. And it sounds like you've got a good structure around how you do these. I wish a lot of organizations would sort of approach it that way because often I think, you know, surveys like a. It's a start of a dialogue, and this is just the ongoing part of the dialogue. The survey kicks off these types of focus discussions around the key drivers. But this allows you to really then dive in deeper to sort of, you know, the nuances of. Of what comes out of results and what really is important to. To employees and to loop it back to them, I think is. Is really good. When's the last time you did one? Is this the more recent one you did? Around the 2024. So we had our survey in 2024, and I'm organizing our focus groups now for that. Oh, perfect, perfect. So you did this one. Was the last 23, I guess, or something like that would have been. Or 22. 2019. 2022. Okay. When you ran this process. So a very similar process you're going to run. Be interesting to hear how it goes in terms of the outcomes. Yeah, yeah. And we are tweaking the process this time around. There's pros and cons to every approach. So what I liked about the focus groups that we had last time was that we had continuity of people. You know, you could build on those discussions and have the rapport, but it was a lot of time commitment for people, and I think that it put a bit of a strain on them for their, you know, just their work schedule. And so, yeah, because we're all, you know, we're all swamped. We're a small municipality, we're all wearing many hats. So it's a big ask. So this time around, I'm trying a new approach, which is to have still the four sessions on each driver, but this time allowing people the opportunity to sign up for one or sign up up to, you know, all of them. And that way, if they're really interested in one area, how we measure performance, if they're really keen on that, they can attend that session and that session alone. And that's also less of a commitment for them. And if they're really keen on all of them, then they could do that as well. So we're going to try that out. I think like I said, there's always pros and cons to every approach. Yeah, it's getting that balance. You're right. And where we've seen too some successes with organizations is, which is what sounds like some of the things you're doing is how do you create this as part of an enrichment. It's part of what they got to do anyway. So part of the initiatives that are ongoing as opposed to creating new, especially for managers creating new initiatives that could be. It's hard because they're busy and if you get a team lead or middle managers, a lot of pressure on them to get things done and have a team that they got to report to. And if they're just looking at the survey, oh, is this another thing I got to add to it? But if you can blend it into what they're already doing, it helps out. Yeah. And I think one thing that will be nice this time around is we have the OD plan developed. So part of our OD plan is having a vision mission statement. We have values, we have our three pillars and so the actions within those we're going to be looking at. But the foundation is there for that OD plan, which was the first time we had developed one for their organization. So that was in 2022 and we had a three year plan in terms of the actions. So some actions of course will roll over and then there will be new ones. And so we'll go through that same process where we take that feedback from staff, you know, do a review with the executives and then be able to update that OD plan. So back in 22, that was the first time you're creating a new. So that was a big, big sort of ask to get all that. Now you've got at least some structure around what that looks like and you're refining it. What are some of the initiatives that came out of it, some of the things you've tagged and some of the things that got into the OD plan the last time and how they've been implemented? Maybe just pick one or two that you'd highlight as, oh, you know, here's one that came out of feedback and here's how it went in and then here's some of the things that we've done and what you've seen as a result. So one of the things that we heard through the survey and the focus groups was around communication, which you mentioned earlier. And so we really heard that staff wanted to hear more about what decisions were being made at the council level and the executive level and some of the why around them. And so one of the initiatives we have in the OD plan is to develop an internal communication strategy. So really around seeing how people want to communicate, what form they want to use, how often, you know, all those questions. And so we did have a survey that went out to staff to assess all of that and to see, you know, what tools do we want need to improve? For example, our intranet, what information are staff not getting right now that they need? So we're developing that strategy. But in the meantime, we also made a very pretty simple change, but has had a huge impact, which is that the city manager's office sends out an email after every council meeting to let all staff know what the decisions were. And within that email, there's also some organizational updates, things coming up, some major projects in the city that, you know, they might hear about. And, you know, in this last survey, we saw a huge jump in the positive response around internal communication, you know, which we can't say exactly why that was, but I do feel like, like even just the weekly emails are really being seen very favorably and that that came out of that survey. So we both, we had both the quick action and we're also working on a bigger strategy as part of our OD plan to improve communications generally in the city. Yeah, it's funny how sometimes, and I think just one small change can really does at times can have a pretty significant impact because I suspect when that email, not everyone probably reads it, but everyone talks about it, right? Someone said, oh, they brought this up. And so even though I may not have read it, maybe my coworker tells me about it, and that's another way I get informed of what's going on. So, so simple things like that can really have, you know, can have a positive impact and hopefully they, you know, not taking a huge amount of time off the, you know, city manager's desk type of thing. So. No, I like that. That's good, good tangible thing that you see as an outcome. That's fantastic. I guess just sort of thinking about lessons learned a little bit and sort of other municipalities, given some of the experiences you've had, if other municipalities are looking to start or improve their surveys, you know, do you have any practical tips that you'd give them in terms of specific resources or tools or processes or things to think about? Is there anything that comes to mind when you think about that? So I think having Good conversations with your leadership team from the outset is really important to, you know, again with that buy in to ensure that for those that are leaned in, they understand why the survey is happening, they can communicate what they want to get out of it. We did engage a subset of our executive group in reviewing the survey questions to make sure that, you know, they were getting what they wanted out of it. And so I think that early leadership discussions are really important. And then I think thinking through the timing of the survey, one thing that was again, a lesson learned for us was we needed a little more coordination on our internal survey front. Because at the time that we had our staff survey, we also had a survey for staff around a digital strategy, and we also had a survey for staff around that internal communication strategy. So I think that we suffered from a little bit of survey fatigue. So I think planning out the timing is important. And then obviously the survey structure, the questions, thinking through the why, why you're asking those questions, what you hope to get out of it, and being really clear on what your action plan is or when the survey concludes, because, you know, that's just the start of the dialogue, the action, the impact. So if you're not prepared to act on those survey results, then you're better off having not asked the questions at all. Yeah, I often align a survey as like a hand grenade in your hand. You know, once you launch it, it's like pulling the pin. You better do something or else it's going to hurt you. And, you know, so it's good to think about it that way. So I agree. You gotta be, you know, ready to act on the results. Otherwise, don't ask the question in terms of what's out there. One last question I just want to ask and then we'll wrap up. This has been fantastic to hear sort of some of these insights just around action planning. Here's one thing you talked about. How do you go about tracking it or getting your managers to follow up on it, or what's the approach or framework? And organizations are all over the map on this one. Some of them just leave it sort of laissez faire. Any organ, you know, manager could do what they want. Just, just make sure you share some of the results to other ones. Have a very strict process around tracking and initiatives and stuff. How do you guys approach it? So I would say that the bulk of our actions will be in that organizational development plan and that allows for a really structured way for us to capture what those actions are. You know, who's the lead on it what the timeframe is, all that kind of project reporting information that you need for the actions that are specific to departments. I've asked the general managers to pick two or three actions that they want to focus on for their department. Of course, every department is unique and has their own needs. And so the OD plan that may not hit their biggest pain points. And so that's what I've asked. And the reason, you know, it's only two or three actions is just to make it a bit more feasible. You know, I didn't want to have a whole departmental kind of OD plan style document for them because, you know, it just has to be realistic in terms of what they can manage too. So I'm trying to focus the effort on the OD plan, which is what I can manage and what I can follow up on, ensure the actions are being tracked and that we are communicating to staff about that. And then at the department level, you know, having a couple of actions that hopefully are hitting the biggest areas for them and then just having kind of ongoing conversations with those GMs about that. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's good. I like to, you know, you're giving them that something that you're for managers at the department level, something that's achievable because if you give them too much, they just say, okay, no, I got to do something else. But, you know, balancing that sort of here, just small bites to go along or baby steps along the way to get them going on some of this stuff I think is really good. So I really appreciate, Marta, your time on this. And I just want to summarize, sort of. Here's sort of what I heard, a couple of things that I wanted to pull out in terms of summary. You know, one is I asked about how do you get alignment with the leadership team? And I like the fact that you're really focused in on sort of the looking for the champions, the people that are, you know, as opposed to spending time on people that may be on board, maybe not on board, and just trying to find the right people to help move this along. You touched a little bit on benchmarking and how you use that data and how it helps you prioritize some of the initiatives. You might think, oh, we got a low score. But then when you look at the benchmark data, well, maybe we're not doing so bad because everyone has a low score on that. So it helps you. Okay, we're still important, but maybe it's not a priority right away. So I thought that was useful. And helpful for others on the listening audience. The focus group work that you did, I thought was quite interesting, especially how you structure it with an opening, you get into the key drivers and a closing and then really invaluable pulling in the executives in at the end so they can also put their view and their lens on it and have them present back to the. The city manager, chief, chief administrative officer. I thought that was a real interesting. And the fact that you're always trying to learn, trying to see you're taking that approach, but tweaking it a little bit, trying something different this coming year, actually, as you're probably getting into them, into them fairly soon. So I thought that was, I thought that was really quite good. And then I thought it was good in terms of when I asked you just a little bit about what' one action that you've seen come out of it. And one of them was there's information communication and there's sort of broad initiatives that are going on. But sometimes the simplest actions can have also a really big impact. And you talked about the city manager just setting a weekly update about what happens at the council meeting. What are some of the decisions we've noticed in a lot of municipalities, that's often a concern is we don't know what's going on because they're not necessarily privy to all those. So having that email, you know, memo going out and having the city managers, you know, here's what I picked up at that meeting, I think is really useful and very valuable. It's really a practice that every, every municipality should consider doing. So I thought that was good. And. And then finally you wrapped up with some real interesting tidbits around the importance of executive buy in. You know, they make sure you got the leadership team aligned. Timing, you talked about that. That's always an important thing. And particular, you know, what else is going on in the organization. If there's other initiatives that are going on, how do you tie? Or maybe it's gotta be pushed ahead or delayed a little bit. So the timing is right and it fits in with sort of the other business context. You talked about the questions, you know, understanding. Don't ask a question if you don't feel you can do something with the results, you know, critical. Sometimes it's, oh, that'd be nice to know. Yeah, it'd be nice to know. But are you gonna do anything with it? And if the answer is no, I think that's something that, that's really, really important. So I think you really cover a lot of really good stuff. And I think it was really helpful to have a sense of, of what you guys are doing there and how you're approaching it. And it's good to hear your level of interest and involvement and in understanding the voice, you know, the voice of employees. So thank you very much. That was great. I guess one last thing is if listeners want to get a hold of you or ask you additional questions, how do they do that? Are you on LinkedIn or how do they best reach out to you? Yes, you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. Excellent. Well, Marta, thank you very much. Thanks so much. This was a great conversation. Thanks for listening to Voice Activated. If you've heard something that got you thinking, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, talk about it, put it into play. That's how better workplaces get built. When you're ready to move from insight into action, head over to telemap.com you'll find tools, resources and strategies to help you lead better with clarity, empathy and impact. And make sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss any more real conversations with leaders who know that some of the best ideas for change don't come from the top, but from those employees closest to the work.