Off the Cuff - Episode 2 - Staffing for a Digital Future

In this episode, we explore how effective team building and creative staffing can transform public sector communications. I share insights from my time as Chief Digital Officer, including strategies for hiring talent from outside traditional government roles and how to adapt to the ever-evolving digital landscape. We also dive into how organizations can evolve skillsets, attract diverse talent, and future-proof their teams to meet today’s communication demands. This episode is packed with actionable takeaways for any leader looking to bring innovation into their organization.

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About Dana
Dana Berchman is an award-winning expert in marketing and communications with a gift for leading teams, connecting people, and telling the human story. An experienced innovator, public speaker and media professional, Dana is a proven expert at developing communication strategies, maximizing reach, creating digital roadmaps for cities and organizations, and delivering data-driven results with heart.

Transcript

During my time as the Chief Digital Officer in Gilbert, one of the things that I was the most proud of was the team that I built. And the positions that I had, you don't often see in the public sector, in government, but I treated this like any other marketing, communications, public relations team. And so most frequently I would be asked for job descriptions, organizational charts of the types of positions I had and What you know what I was looking to do and who I was hiring.

But it's also that because I had created jobs and positions like this. It attracted people from the private sector to want to come to work in the public sector. So it's not just about the job description. Who are you going to get to fill the position, right? And maybe you can look around your organization and see people that you already have who are willing to upskill to be able to fill those positions.

But sometimes, especially in government, you might not see people in the organization with those skill sets. So you have to get creative and figure out how to go find them. This is something I always took a lot of pride in in previous jobs. casting was a huge component of the job. I was actually the original casting director for Sixteen and Pregnant at MTV.

And just like hiring, it's one of my favorite things to do is look for talent and find people and put them In the right roles and set them up for success. And so hiring is, is one of the keys to this, not just creating the job description. You can create great job descriptions with cool titles and they'll attract a lot of people, but really digging in to find a diverse skill set.

To build your team is also so critical, Where are the gaps that you have? How do you shore those up in other ways? So when I created the digital road map in Gilbert for the first time in in 2012, critical to that was what positions and what types of people with what skill sets did I need to bring this to life?

I mentioned in a previous podcast episode that audio visual technicians who just pushed buttons In public meetings were not Most likely to be the creative content Creators that I needed and so I had to look around and see what was the skill set.

Now, oftentimes you'll hear in government, people come to, to these jobs and. And die in them, right? They're there. They're incentivized by retirement and longevity, unlike the private sector where you're incentivized for performance. this was really critical to our success. Our city manager had come in and was operating the organization with at will employees.

And also important to understand that If people weren't willing to evolve their skill sets to stay relevant and meet the job that we need today and into the future that we had the ability to , eliminate certain positions and create new ones. One example of this that I always give is a neighborhood specialist who had previously held open houses in a, in a council chamber that no one ever came to with punch and cookies.

This was no longer needed. Neighborhood specialists needed to be online, communicating people with people where they were through Nextdoor and other platforms of social media. New people moving to Gilbert or any community were likely young people with families and they weren't going to come to have punch and cookies and get a pamphlet, a flyer, a handout, right?

You've got to go to them and engage them where they are on these various platforms. So that was really critical. So sometimes it's taking and, and looking, hey, this is what we needed five years ago, but this isn't what we need now into the future. This happened a lot in the video space, when I first hired a digital journalist at Gilbert, it was someone that was still probably most likely to put a camera on a tripod.

Maybe someone from the news business that was going to use a lav mic and mic someone up and And all of that. And now we're doing more of that run and gun vertical video and, and, and short form and long form is, is really back again too. But who are those people with those skill sets that you're going to need to, to diversify your team and be sure that you're going to stay relevant and be able to create the content that your citizen resident customer is going to want.

So, as I mentioned, I would get, you know, questions for job descriptions, and, and so let me tell you that even a job description that I'd created when I started in 2012 was no longer necessarily a job description that I needed in 2017 when we hit that five year mark. One example of this were data positions.

We needed data storytellers. I needed developers on my team. Even though I'm not in IT. Department. I was a communications department. I needed somebody who could redesign the website and who understood how to use mobile applications and who was tech savvy. I call this position kind of my tech guru, right?

It was critical to the success of all we were doing. So when I laid out a plan for the digital road map, it included an org chart and I And I kind of took the positions I had and eliminated some and created different positions. For example, I had three audio visual technicians. I eliminated those. I outsourced the audio visual work to a company that does this for other cities.

and does the broadcasting of public meetings. And I created just three. So I took three positions, outsourced one and created two digital journalists who were video storytellers, They used social media, they were using video, short and long form to tell stories. And so I hired those positions and over time those even changed.

And at one point I had someone who was more of a news background, the quicker like run and gun turnaround package type stories. And then I had someone that was a film major who could help us with the more long form. And we We're not going to have an in person state of the city address. We were going to have a virtual one and we were going to make a video that we could send to thousands of people, not just people who would attend an event.

So I needed a documentary storyteller. And so that's what I went looking for on my team. And so this is really important, I didn't necessarily need that right away when I first started out, but five years in I did. And so you don't always get new positions. In fact over 12 years in government, I only was added one new position.

Every other position was gifted to me by other departments or I had to rethink kind of like a puzzle, who were the pieces I had, what were the skillsets I needed and what didn't I have and figure out how to piece that all together again with a very minimal budget and a small budget. Small, nimble team, critical is nimble, having people that are well rounded that can do many things right in, in marketing and in the content creation world.

that is not uncommon, right? You will be required to write, to shoot, to produce, to edit your own video, then promote it, then track it. How well did it do? All of that is part of your job in government. It tended to be that you stayed in more of a lane. And so I wanted more well rounded people with many skillsets that could do all different types of jobs.

So what that vision looks like at the beginning, and again, I was able to start kind of from scratch and build a team. So not everyone out there is going to be able to do that or have that luxury. Sometimes you walk in, you inherit, you're handed a team and you say, okay, what can I do with this? Where can I go?

But you can do that. And working with people, whether it's your HR department, which became our people department, working with them creatively, going and looking other places in the organization. So one thing that I did was I took within my department a lot of projects that you would typically see in IT departments in other places, but the IT department was great at running the back end, but not that outward facing, forward facing piece, 

They're a critical partner for the success of all of these initiatives, but it was important that all of this again, outward facing marketing, talking to the customer, the resident, the citizen be centralized in one place. So we could understand all of those channels and coordinate messaging around them and what was going out.

So some of those projects, some of the examples I give, if you're a city out there listening, you may have these silos, The larger the city gets, the easier this is to see these silos. So you can have. You know, IT departments in police departments that don't talk to the central IT department. That's very common, and that's fine but you have to think, you know, really critically and carefully, like, how are we structured for success?

How do we all work together, And be sure that that is a coordinated effort. So some of the projects that I took that I ran out of my department, which you don't typically see in government or other cities, are a 3 1 1 system. Our website, our open data program, our open data portal, the creation of it, all of that was done within my team.

And again, I have a developer, a data storyteller. 

And again, it's not just that I was hiring a data storyteller.

It's the person that I got to come and fill this role who was a former math teacher, again, worked at NASA, understood critically the importance of the storytelling and she really was able to help us do things and inform through data and stories out onto all of our channels into social media and connect all of the dots and inform the mayor and council ahead of critical decisions that they needed to make so that they were armed with the data.

Those positions did not live in an IT department. They lived in the centralized communications, marketing, digital communications team. And were critical to our success. So in the beginning, as I said, the first iteration was, you know, seven positions to create a very robust communications plan for a city of, again, today, almost 300, 000 people.

So this is, this is really critical when you don't have big budgets, even more of a reason why you need people with diverse skill sets who can help you in many different ways, Somebody that's just able to manage your website, but that can't write and can't help you in other ways might not be the best route.

It took me actually three years of asking to get a full time social media person. That was the only position that I ever went through the budget process. Asking for a new FTE was for social media, and one response I got at some point is, well, what's this person gonna do, sit on Twitter all day?

Yeah, that's a full time job. And guess what? It's not nine to five. It's around the clock. It's 24 seven. These are seven day a week jobs, right? Not just in a crisis, but all the time the world is happening and we should be there to respond to people when they need it. Most likely the people that need something usually need you when they're not at work, right?

They need you at night. They need you on the weekends. They need you when there's an emergency. And sometimes not, they just have a question they need to ask and someone needed to respond. So I took great pride in the fact that. Our team always was very responsive around the clock. We weren't your typical government team.

But again, you shouldn't be. Government is an exception. If social media teams are expected to be there and respond 24 seven, then, then our team should as well. we thought long and hard about what this looked like. And we used to have like a 24 hour policy that we would respond or acknowledge any comment.

That became undoable over time. The amount of comments that were coming in, the larger audience became the more channels we were on. That just wasn't realistic anymore. We weren't getting more social media people as we got more channels and more followers.

So you have to figure out how to make those adjustments. But this was really one of the major questions I would get from people from other cities or other organizations about how did you structure the team? What kind of people with what kind of skill sets are you looking for? And so this is, this is a really critical and important piece.

So, I would say to that, again, similar to what I've said in the past, to start small. Start with what you have. Look at what you have. Where can you make some adjustments, some changes, and get some Some big wins, you know, make a big impact with something small. for me, this has always been something I'm really proud of is, you know the people again that you need today, you might not need in the future.

And that's all right, especially when you're not just going to get to pile on, Like I'm not going to get five more positions in five years. I'm going to have to understand what do these positions look like and what are the expectations of these people in these roles?

We had launched our 3 1 1 system.

A lot of our employees internally were very intimidated by the word data and the fact that they had to use this system. And what we realized is streets workers and their in their everyday lives aren't necessarily smartphone users at the time. So we had to train them in the technology and understanding how to just simply go into the system and close out issues.

And then also how to take this data and make it useful for them. So they could say, Hey, here's the resources and the staff that I need to do my job because here's the problems that exist. So arm them with it, empower them with the data. 

There is often, as I've mentioned, a big disconnect between what your residents and your citizens want and what your elected officials think they want, not, not at their own fault, but sometimes they need to be informed and armed. With the information and they might be listening to a very small group of people.

But when you can survey, The public, we could get 2, 500 respondents over a weekend on a brief survey and, you know, again, not statistically valid results, but enough to guide us in decision making and basic, give us a pulse, a feel of what our residents really wanted.

And so that's really critical. And these are easy. you can do that that are cost effective. We're not mailing a survey and, and spending all this time and money and energy to get this information back. It's just, Hey, can you just Hold off till Monday. Let me get some feedback on how people feel about electric scooters in our community before we rush to kick Bird, the scooter company, out of our community with a cease and desist letter.

Let's ask our residents what they think of it, right? And we would do that. We would say, Oh, well, here's what they say. And a lot of times it's surprising. We could take that a step further and say, let's put our police chief on a scooter and have him make a video to inform the public about what they can and can't do with, with, with these scooters.

That's a great idea, right? Again, all of this coordinated within my team. And that brings me to police, which was another interesting change that we made about five years ago We. decided that after 17 public information officers had been trained police and firefighters, police officers and firefighters doing these jobs, communicating on social media, writing press releases, all of that.

And to their credit, they are not trained marketers, professionals in that way. And, and so after going through that process, I said, you know, the people in these roles, yes, they need to understand and be embedded in these departments and understand public safety from the inside out. But they also need to be.

And so um, we've been working with a lot of community marketers, writers, people that can understand what is a community want to hear from a police chief in a time of crisis. And so the public information officers in police and fire and parks and recreation were embedded in those teams as a team member of those departments, but reported back in to the chief digital officer, me, the communications director.

And this helped us tremendously, especially through the year of 2020 through communicating through COVID a major pandemic and social unrest. Post George Floyd's death. You know, what does a police chief say to a community in a time of crisis? 

What does the community want to hear from their police department? What is that content? so this was really an amazing opportunity for us to showcase coordinated messaging.

Again, going back to a point that I've made in an earlier podcast, as well as start developing that audience now. And then when people need you most, you're already there. You've built that trust, you've built that relationship, you've built that following. And so when you go to them or need something from them and or need to get information to them, they're already there.

So this was critical to a lot of the success we had in communicating with our residents during times of need in a crisis. many times people want to know what the secret sauce is. I would look. Not within government or within other government organizations for job descriptions, but I would pick and choose from other places.

I remember looking at data storytellers that Deloitte was hiring or other companies and say, Okay, this is what I'm looking for when I would piece these job descriptions together, You didn't always go out into the world and see these job descriptions, and so sometimes we had to make them.

And then again, it was critical to find the right person to fill them.

So if you're out there looking to build your communications team, maybe you're rebuilding a team, maybe you're starting from scratch, maybe you're a one man, one woman, one person band, I know how that goes, and so you really are looking for that one specific well rounded person, right? You don't have the ability to have a big team.

Or, if you're looking to transform your traditional communications team into a digital one, for many reasons why, um, including the incorporation of things like AI now, and chatbots, and using those skills, and text services, and all of these other ways we should be looking to communicate with our residents, our customers, and our citizens, if you're out there thinking about starting, if you want to do a reorganization, if you're looking for job descriptions, or What should you be looking for in order to be successful if you have a traditional communications team, if you still have a staff running your public access television channel, but you're looking for a more digital, complex content creation team and want some advice on how to make that transition.

I have done that. Um, that's exactly what I did and it's, it's critical, You're not behind, it's never too late to start. And so if this is something that interests you and you're thinking about the people you have and how you can upskill or maybe make some changes in movement or how you can go into your organization and look for others to help you, um, how can you get started, whether it's on social media platforms or just getting new people into infuse.

your communications plan, this is really important and remember all of this with the goal in mind is to meet people where they are, communicate with them the way they want to be communicated with, go to them. If you do this right, not only is your engagement higher, but all of this translates to a more informed citizenry.

Civic engagement people and your residents and your citizens will be more likely to turn out to vote to pass that bond initiative that you need, It's just like a customer experience with a product, pleasing and delighting your customers, pleasing and delighting your citizens. There's so many missed opportunities to do that in government.

And if this is something that you're interested in and something that you're really thinking about, but don't know where to start, please reach out and get in touch with me.