Engaging the Workforce in Organizational Change and Strategic Planning

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Nicole Wojciechowski
March 24, 2025

In today’s modern and constantly evolving workplace environments, our workforces expect more from the organizations they work for are thinking about working for than ever before. It is no longer sufficient for an employer to provide a livable salary, good benefits and a healthy work-life balance. While those remain important, they are base-line requirements for any employee or perspective employee.

As public managers and leaders of these organizations, we must create a workplace that supports modern workforce needs. Our organizations must innovate and modernize obsolete processes, programs and environments that support healthy and positive workplace culture and enable employees to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.

There is a perception that innovation and modernization are difficult to achieve in public organizations. That perception isn’t untrue; however, the challenges that plague any and most government organizations are not new. The likelihood of having the financial and human capital necessary to achieve the sweeping organization change desired is slim. Therefore, public managers should leverage the resources available to them through employee-driven strategic planning and engaging the workforce in organization changes with leadership support.

It is time to lean into the untapped creativity and knowledge of your employees, allowing for them to identify and implement the solutions for the issues holding your organization back and impacting your ability to deliver core goods and services. I encourage you to take the back seat, listen to your teams, and develop a strategic plan to address the organization’s most pressing challenges through a “grass roots” process that engages your employees from planning, development and implementation.

Your employees, your team, are the front lines and have an understand of the organization’s day to day function that public managers often become detached from when they ascend to executive or senior leadership. I encourage you to take the back seat, listen to your teams and develop a strategic plan to address the organization’s most pressing challenges through a “grass roots” process that engages your employees from planning, development and implementation.

I did this at my own organization. Leadership began to recognize growing frustrations with nearly all functional areas of the agency. For far too long, the “little” things were left behind and now became inflated issues that hindered our workforce’s ability to fulfill their personal and professional responsibilities, but also our organization’s mission.

As we embarked on a near yearlong strategic planning process, we left out the private consultants and leaned on those who know our organization best—our workforce. In development of our new strategic plan, which serves as the roadmap for modernization, innovation and establishing a positive workplace culture, our leadership implemented various engagement strategies that allowed for employees to provide feedback, criticism and solutions on the major pain points we were facing as an organization. Creating a system of “buy-in”, where employees feel their participation is valued, considered and voices are heard is the bed rock for strategic planning and organizational change.

As we received feedback from the employees, I began to organize, prioritize and group the issues into 5 Core Focus Areas which organizational leadership was responsible for developing associated objectives, goals and solutions to address the problems. This created the foundation for our organization’s employee-driven strategic plan.

Where some public managers go wrong is they go through the strategic planning process as a formality, because of course your organization needs a strategic plan. The strategic planning process doesn’t end once the document is published or sitting on a bookshelf. As your workforce now sees their contributions in the plan and have bought in to your vision. It’s leadership’s obligation to buy-in to its implementation and find creative ways, with the resources available to you, to make actionable efforts and change with your strategic plan as the roadmap.

The methodology of an employee-driven plan doesn’t start and end with its development. Employee participation in implementation of your strategic plan should and must be a critical component in the process. Your team is your resources—their engagement and participation in being part of the solution is indispensable. Leadership cannot be the source of all solutions. As leaders, you must advocate and empower your workforce to be the mechanism of change.

The modern workforce is becoming more dynamic and looking for more in the workplace than a job—they are looking for a community that allows them to think freely, creatively and contribute meaningfully. When your employees are fulfilling personal ambitions and professionally engaged in the workplace, your organization is better positioned to meet its core mission and serve the public more effectively.

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Author: Nicole Wojciechowski is a student at the University of Baltimore working toward a Master of Arts in Public Administration. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Salisbury University in 2018. She currently serves as Chief of Staff at the Maryland State Highway Administration overseeing the organizations public affairs and policy functions. Her role also directly supports executive leadership with organizational change and strategic initiatives.

 

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