What are three things you learned about the government

1. RESIDENTS WANT SPEED

Your residents want you to resolve their issues quickly. If they call or email your agency and you don’t respond the same day, within a few hours, they will feel hopeless and out of luck. As a taxpayer, that isn’t something you want to experience.

In addition to response time, your residents expect you to resolve their issues quickly, as well. Many

residents need to contact an agency five or six times before their issue gets addressed. That doesn’t build confidence in your agency, and you need the support of your residents.

How can you use this to improve in 2020? By eliminating the bottlenecks in your process. Find out where

issues spend the most time and use that as your starting point. If you find that department heads are sitting on jobs for too long without delegating them, you know you’ve found your problem.

It will vary from agency to agency but do the best you can to find the problem and resolve it so you can shorten the amount of time it takes to manage resident concerns.

2. RESIDENTS WANT COMMUNICATION

The residents in your local area want to know that their voices are heard; they don’t expect to be ignored when they come around with a concern. Many don’t have an avenue of communication because they don’t attend city council meetings, and they may not think that calling your agency ever yields a result.

How can you use this to improve in 2020? Provide a way for everyone to communicate with your agency.

The best way to create this communication is through a community engagement app like the OneView citizen engagement tool.

3. RESIDENTS LIKE STANDING OUT

If there's one thing we’ve learned over the past few years about government in general, it’s that people don’t trust it. People think that governments don’t have the best interest of residents in mind, and that’s a problem that a lot of agencies face.

You need to do whatever you can to stand out, and sometimes making dramatic changes and doing things

differently is the best way to show your residents that you care about them. You can show them that you’re not afraid to put in the work to do something different that will change their perception of your agency.

Residents want someone who doesn’t conform to the way that “things are always done.” If the recent

situation in our country has taught us anything it's that people want someone who isn't afraid to be different.

Your traditional political strategy doesn't always work anymore. Your residents expect you to make significant changes. Here lies your chance to make a huge difference as the leader of

"harry t. moore (1905-1951) – civil rights activist, leader, and the first martyr of the civil rights movement. fannie lou hamer (1917–1977) – leader in the american civil rights movement; co-founder of the national women's political caucus and freedom democratic party. james farmer (1920–1999) – congress of racial equality."