If someone says change in an organization is easy, then they’re lying.
Nothing is easy to change at work.
Everyone wants to change their organization and get their employees time back.
But years and years go into creating services and processes that work for an organization.
To meaningfully innovate, you have to start small.
And you have to find a way it will work for your team and the resources at your disposal.
If you can’t start by making small changes with what you have…
…how will you make massive changes to your services down the road?
Now, there is nothing easy about creating more than thirty small changes.
But that is exactly what the city of Port Saint Lucie, Florida did.
Port Saint Lucie, also known as PSL to the locals, is a city in southeastern Florida ~2 hours north of Miami that experiences a lot of tropical storms.
Unlike other cities which utilize curb and gutter systems for heavy rainfall, Port Saint Lucie has a “swale” system.
A “swale” is an open water catchment system which utilizes shallow ditches and natural slopes to catch all rainwater and naturally irrigate your soil.
It works perfectly fine.
But to the average joe, it looks as if your house is going to flood every time there’s a storm.
As you could imagine, this causes a bit of confusion among the locals living in Port Saint Lucie.
PSL city employees were getting inundated with over 400 calls a month from locals nervous about losing their house to a storm.
As you can imagine, most of the Port Saint Lucie city employees’ time was spent answering the same questions on calls…
…which left them less time to tackle the bigger hurdles that required their attention.
After taking one of our courses, the city of Port Saint Lucie took a look at what simple, small, and practical changes they could make to get their time back.
First, they updated their website so it would self-service their citizens’ needs.
At the end of the day, no one wants to call a government phone number. They only do it if they feel like their questions aren’t being answered.
So, to make the website more self service, they:
- Added an FAQs page answering common questions they were getting on calls
- Added interactive graphic and video tutorials explaining the swale system
- Updated all the information to be current and in plain language removing technical language from the engineers.
On top of updating their website, they got ahead of people calling them.
They used video message boards around town and emailed residents to let them know:
- A tropical storm was coming
- The street is designed to move the water
- Only to call if they had water in their house
All of these small changes came together to make a big impact.
After implementing these changes, they went from 400 to 150 calls in a month.
That’s right, their call volume more than halved. They got their time back.
The city employees of Port Saint Lucie finally had time to tackle their bigger challenges.
Want to learn more about how you can get you and your employee’s time back at work?
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