Albany, OR has had a strategic plan for a long time. The plan is viewed as a Council document directing staff on the goals for the city to be moving towards. In our case, it is fully metric based with actions and measures.

The plan was drafted by senior management. Each deparment prepared their proposals, involving their staff as necessary.

I would suggest that a strategic document is one that can certainly have input from many staff, but must be a targeted management proposal based on the assessment of resources, priority of need, and feasibility of implementation. A strategic plan should not be a staff "wish list."

Sorry - I must have missed the question. We have a strategic plan and to engage employees we created on online survey and held focus groups for employees. We are now repeating the process as we update the plan - another online survey and focus groups for employees who don't have easy access to computers.

The City of Tamarac has a couple of tools we use specifically to engage our employees in the Strategic Planning Process.

At the start of our Strategic Planning Process we utilize our mid level managers to conduct department level SWOT analyses for each of our 5 strategic goals as a way to involve employees at all levels in our Strategic Planning Process. We then use an established quarterly meeting of those mid level managers as a forum for a group exercise to roll the department SWOTS up to a city-wide SWOT for each goal and develop preliminary action items to address some of the issues. This "pre-work" carries over to the Executive Strategic Planning Retreat and has the benefit of both prioritizing the SWOTS as well as ensuring employees contribute to the process. The completed strategic plan is a 4 page document that goes to all employees - so it is a living, breathing document that employees can refer to and understand.

We also utilize a tool we call a "Tri-Fold card" which is made up of 3 panels that fold to fit in an employee's badge holder. The panels state our mission, vision, values, and strategic goals - but they also have a blank panel for employees to write in how their job ties to the City's strategic goals. We hand them out to all employees and then utilize a team of employees to ask to see them (and guide them on how their job ties in if they need assistance) - employee names who filled out their card get entered into a city-wide drawing for gift certificates and we are at nearly 100% participation. The cards have become a part of our culture - we just updated them for the third time as two of our strategic goals changed last year.

Through the use of these tools we have seen our employee survey scores increase over the years - specifically those questions that that address knowing the mission, vision, values and strategic direction of the City.