Award Winners Refute Common Perceptions - HR Magazine Innovative Practice Awards - Brief Article

HR Magazine, July, 2001 by John T Adams III

Americans have a love-hate relationship with our governments. We elect and empower them and, for the most part, obey them. But we simultaneously distrust and disparage them. Too often, we're disappointed in their cost, efficiency and delivery of services, often while waiting in long lines to negotiate some tedious paperwork or Kafkaesque bureaucratic procedure.

But there are governments and agencies at all levels that serve their citizens effectively. Some of them could teach most private-sector businesses a thing or two about progressive management.

HR departments in two such governments are among the three winners of this year's HR Magazine Innovative Practice Awards--surprising even the independent judges who selected them. The awards are cosponsored by ADP Inc. and the SHRM Foundation, and the winners were honored last month at the SHRM 53rd Annual Conference and Exposition in San Francisco.

From more than 30 entries, our judges singled our two progressive municipalities for their HR programs and a third, private-sector, winner in different size categories:

* Among small employers with up to 500 employees, the winner is the Village of Downers Grove, Ill., a Chicago suburb with about 50,000 people.

Downers Grove developed an Internet-based subscription service HR database that allows 60 municipal governments in the Chicago metropolitan area to share salary data on 71 jobs, as well as data on benefits plans, collective bargaining agreements and HR policies.

* In the medium-sized category for organizations with 501 to 2,500 employees, the winner is the City of Concord, Calif., a city of 115,000 people about 30 miles from San Francisco.

Concord created a comprehensive program to provide training for all city employees on the city's mission, vision and values. Such an effort is rare in the private sector, not to mention the public sector, but the program is simple and adaptable to almost any business environment.

* Finally, in the large-employer category for organizations with 2,500 or more employees, the winner is Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, a shipbuilder for the U.S. Navy.

Bath implemented an employee communications and business ethics program that effectively incorporates ethical discussions into regular staff meetings, emphasizes management participation and imparts a consistent message.

To learn more about this year's winners, see Bill Leonard's article on page 53. And if you're doing innovative HR work that others could learn from, please enter this year's awards contest. Entry forms are on SHRM Online at www.shrm.org/hrmagazine, and the deadline is Dec. 31.