Oklahoma City puts the focus on employees when implementing changes in office technology

The City of Oklahoma City (OKC) is no stranger to growing pains. Like so many cities and local governments facing budget, resource and time constraints, the fastest-growing city in Oklahoma has, at times, had to do more with less. But despite this, we’ve remained committed to advancing our city forward and putting our 5,000+ employees at the center of everything we do from an IT and business perspective when implementing change, and often being pioneers in the changes we are implementing.

Advancing our human capital management strategy and implementing a new system has helped us fill longstanding HR gaps, optimize our back-office workflows, and allows us to focus on supporting our people in their daily work. In doing so, our employees are working smarter, not harder, to support their growing community. For other cities and local governments working to achieve the same, here’s my advice:

1) Enable smarter ways of working. From the employee perspective, our new system looks better, works better and is easier to use—all of which helped us establish confidence in the application and drive adoption out of the gate. With any Enterprise-level change, making things better for the users—our employees—is always our priority, whether it be simplifying a process or helping to implement a better business practice. It really is the key to fostering an inclusive and diverse work culture where people are driven to produce exceptional results while feeling valued and that their voice is heard.

2) Don’t be afraid of change. Many times, legacy systems have been around for decades and people often do things one way because “that’s the way they’ve always been done.” Taking the time to understand your business by working with your end users, knowing their pain points, is critical. When OKC migrated our time and attendance needs to a modern workforce management system in 2020, we standardized almost 20 years of outdated configurations and created meaningful efficiencies to help our people work smarter. Instead of a lift and shift, take the opportunity to look at the nuts and bolts of your systems and analyze whether processes still make sense and are following best practice.

3) Streamline and centralize employee data. Make it easy for your people to access their own employee data: their hours worked, paystubs, tax forms, you name it. Why should employees have to request these things from a manger when you could give them access to their own self-service dashboard? The same goes for department managers. Increasing visibility into operational data for our managers and payroll officers makes a difference in empowering them to make informed business decisions in the moment that are backed by data trends.

4) Unburden your people so they can achieve their highest potential. Today, nearly 100 percent of OKC employees electronically validate and approve their timecards, up from 60 percent before. In addition to protecting employees and making sure they’re paid correctly, automating this process now requires our payroll team to do far less data entry. To put a number on it, all 150 of our payroll officers are spending less time processing payroll each week—four hours less, on average, which adds up to an estimated savings of 600 hours per week citywide. Our payroll team is doing more analysis now and their roles have become more sophisticated and empowering. We already see this translating to higher levels of productivity and expect our employee retention levels to benefit because people tend to stick around when they feel a greater sense of fulfillment in their roles.

The digital transformation of state and local governments is a powerful endeavor that has helped many modernize ancient processes and unlock a wealth of data about their workforce. But you need to ask yourself: Who does this benefit? OKC’s decision to invest in people and to make them a core focus of our Enterprise application strategy has been key to increasing productivity and advancing the work culture across all our departments. It’s not all about time and cost savings—it’s about putting the humanity back in the data. Every chart or report represents a person with a story.

Stephen Fuller is the enterprise program manager for the City of Oklahoma City and has been with the organization since 2014.