By Toni Shope and Karen Thoreson

Grievance. Does this word put you to sleep or drive you to distraction? If you have any tenure in local government, probably both! And what does it have to do with innovation, emerging practices, and getting better results?

The Local Government Research Collaborative (LGRC) completed its first funded research project this year: Red Tape, Green Tape, and Grievance Policies in Local Government Organizations. Principal researcher Dr. Leisha Dehart-Davis, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, School of Government, studied North Carolina local governments through surveys and interviews to understand grievance policy designs, outcomes, and effectiveness.

Grievance policies provide a value beyond managing legal risk and due process for employees. The process itself surfaces information, allowing local governments the ability to track data across the organization and identify managerial and department weak spots that need to be addressed. Grievance policies also symbolize fairness and provide employees an opportunity to make their concerns known.

Key Findings

Here are the research findings, which ran the gamut from surprising to expected:

Most grievance policies are old. The average age of these policies in surveyed governments was nine years, which could mean that many were a lot older than that.

Old policies reflect more bureaucratic approaches and often less employee trust and engagement. Updating and simplifying grievance policies, hopefully in an open and transparent process, can go a long way to making those policies more employee and management friendly.

Grievances are expensive. They can be time-consuming, distracting, often divisive, and extract an emotional toll on everyone involved. One way to minimize grievances is having an effective performance appraisal system in place with periodic employee surveys and good supervisory training.

While the research found that nearly 80 percent of grievances were solved in favor of management, anecdotes from practicing city and county managers indicate that that may be because management can shortcut the process and accommodate the employee if its own case is weak.

Really good data on grievances is hard to come by and few organizations keep records that can help them understand the hotspots in their organization or the policies that might be causing the problems. The study recommended tracking grievances using a dashboard or Excel spreadsheet to help learn how they can be prevented.

With the spreadsheet approach, it could be as simple as annually identifying by department how many grievances were filed by supervisors and by individuals, along with what the subjects and the outcomes were.

Study research also showed that the standard process most localities use—written document, written response, review, interview, determination, and possible appeal—compounds the friction involved in grievances because the parties don’t talk to one another, nor do they try and solve their problem. They stand their ground and hope they win.

Instead of a grievance being used to create dialogue and problem solving, we’ve seen it wielded by management or a disgruntled employee as a heavy hammer, where scripted responses are required within a specified time period and dialogue is secondary to meeting deadlines.

Consider renaming your policy to something that more reflects the result you want to achieve: appeal, problem solving, mediation, consult, and resolve. These terms might better reflect the approach you want and the outcome you hope to achieve.

Consider an Evaluation

Well-designed grievance policies lead to better management decisions. It’s important to invest time in determining what you want out of a dispute resolution process. This could include thinking through whether a “one-size-fits-all” approach is the best way to proceed.

Consider undertaking an overhaul of your current grievance process. Include key stakeholders—senior managers, frontline employees, supervisors, and human resource professionals—in the grievance re-think. Have them evaluate your current process against some of these criteria for effective rules:

• The purpose and logic of the policy and process.
• The quality and clarity of the requirements.
• What level of control should be provided to both the employee and supervisor?
• The consistency and/or flexibility you want the policy to allow.
• How easy to understand is the process and policy for the whole organization?
• What training can be provided to help avoid routine conflicts?

It should not be a lengthy or momentous task, but an evaluation might help you and your organization be confident that you have in place an effective dispute resolution process when you need it. This could save time, money, and morale.

Or investigate some of the other suggestions in the report like an ombudsman or public advocate office, mediation, or a zero-fault grievance system.

The Alliance for Innovation (AFI) defines innovation as a new process, approach, or service that is new to you or to the organization and produces better results. Revisiting the goals and processes you use to resolve issues among employees in order to improve your organizational cultural and effectiveness meets that criteria.

Take a moment and review the new research produced on grievance policies and see if you can’t make measureable improvement in your own organization. The full report can be accessed at AFI’s website—www.transformgov.org—under the Research tab, where you will also find a letter from Dehart-Davis that describes how she would use the findings if she were a manager in local government.

Local Government Research Collaborative

In early 2013, 21 local governments and three universities joined together with AFI, the International City/County Management Association, and the Center for Urban Innovation at Arizona State University to establish the Local Government Research Collaborative (LGRC). It is developing and funding an actionable research agenda that addresses significant issues confronting local governments.

LGRC provides the critical link between academic researchers and local governments and allows managers direct input on the identification of emerging and leading practices that will have the most impact on the profession. It will also shape a research agenda to expand our knowledge of how local governments pursue innovative change and fundamentally improve their performance.

Collecting Better Data

Do you want to collect better data about your grievance procedures? Is there something unique about them—or about your dispatch system, animal control operation, or economic development initiatives that makes them difficult to benchmark?

ICMA Insights™ (icma.org/performanceinsights) tracks more than 900 key indicators, but it also has options for custom measures—either for comparison with other jurisdictions or just for internal tracking and dashboarding over time.