Building a Strong Team at Your Public Housing Agency
Building a Strong Team at Your Public Housing Agency
By Jerome Ryans, President & CEO, Tampa Housing Authority
In many ways, hiring for a public housing office is not very different from hiring for any other office. Some components of what make a good team - like communication and fitting skillsets - are universal. For other aspects, you may need to tailor your approach to fit the public agency sector.
So, how can you ensure that potential employees are a good fit and will work well together? It starts with your hiring process.
Building Your Internal Team: Creating a Great Hiring Process
It is important to make your hiring process thorough, efficient, and attractive to talented candidates. These purposes can feel at odds, so if you feel that you are performing a delicate balancing act when hiring, let it be acknowledged: you are!
Also note that some of the factors reach deeper than the process itself and into the job details. For example, a candidate's aptitude to advance your agency's mission. Is this someone who is already involved in community service? How highly does this person value helping others? I always say that housing people is ministry work. If the passion isn't there, the candidate will likely not be a good fit for the long run at a housing authority.
Attracting Talent to the Public Sector
One of the largest hiring challenges that your public housing agency may face is the stigma about working for public agencies. Some private companies with different funding sources may be able to offer ballooned salaries compared to the stricter, government- and grant-funded budgets of public agencies.
However, you do have one big competitive hiring edge: stability. Make the case for this differentiation in your job posts and when you are giving information in the interview. While a startup might be able to pay more for a few years, there is no guarantee that the company will even exist after its initial boom.
A public housing position, on the other hand, is very likely here to stay. You will also want to emphasize the long-term payoffs of health insurance and retirement benefits that come with a public housing position.
Another sticking point? Private companies may be able to offer slicker work interfaces, technology, and more flexible schedules.
In these cases, we do need to do better to attract talent. While some parts of a public housing job involve confidential information - which means that an employee could not perform the job on their personal laptop at a coffee shop - can you find ways to give employees more freedom, flexibility, and ease at work?
We already had to become resourceful to perform remote services during the pandemic. Consider those lessons and keep what worked and appealed to employees.
For instance, you could provide some employees with a work-only computer to be able to work from home - or at least maintain a hybrid office/home schedule. This is a huge benefit to many potential employees, so it greatly widens your talent pool. If a potential employee can gain the stability of a government job with the flexibility of a private sector job, the gap of desirability starts to narrow.
Lastly, one surface-level starting place for attracting more applicants is to simplify your application process. Some job seekers completely avoid public agencies because they expect a clunky, bureaucratic application process.
Invest a little in updating your digital job application process to simplify it. If you can get back to applicants with a faster response rate than expected, even better.
Open Up Your Hiring Process
By switching to skills-based hiring when possible - instead of diploma-based hiring - your agency can become a source of upward mobility for people who struggle to afford formal education. Part of that is paying more attention to transferable skills.
Be willing to hire younger and less experienced people. Why? Because the public sector is disproportionately weighted with people who are near retirement. If we do not proactively create a new generation of workers, we may be setting ourselves up for a sudden workforce vacuum.
Apprenticeships and internships can form a great solution to this. The simple fact that apprenticeships and internships have lower hiring bars may expose your job listings to far more applicants.
Keep in mind: making an internship unpaid undoes some of this effect, because it limits the talent pool to people with the socioeconomic means to work for free for an extended period of time.
The bottom line is that almost any role at your public housing agency is going to require some specialized training and upskilling unless you hire someone directly from the public housing sector. Given the reality that training will be invested in a person regardless of their background, what hiring factors are actually essential?
Take Diversity and Inclusion Seriously
Skills-based hiring also helps to expand the diversity of your workforce in regards to gender, ethnicity, and age. As other public housing advocates will affirm, diversity in hiring matters - not just from an idealistic view of "how the world should be," but also for its practical benefits.
For attraction purposes alone, you will receive a broader pool of applicants if your office contains people to whom a variety of potential employees can relate. It is a positive signal to job seekers that their voice is more likely to be valued at this agency. The benefits go far deeper than attracting talent.
A Carnegie Mellon study found that the highest performing teams had a mixed gender composition. They deduced that increased collective intelligence was the main advantage, which frequently came from the female members of the team.
Researchers reasoned that, since most women are socialized from birth to be attentive to the needs of others, they brought this attentiveness and cooperative ability to their jobs, as well. This is just one example of how a unique social experience can bring unexpected strengths to a team. Choose your hires wisely. Their diverse life experiences - or the lack thereof - can really affect performance.
Function-Based Groups
The same Carnegie Mellon research showed that teams operate quite differently depending on what they are trying to accomplish. For instance, teams that needed to achieve a creative goal called for different skills. These teams operated on different timelines than teams that needed to focus on efficiency.
You can see how this could play into public housing agency projects - some departments need to focus on big-picture improvement, which involves more creativity and idea exploration, while others need to focus on how to get things done in a quick way without missing important details. The study concluded that a large part of long-term employee success is placing a person in the role and on the team that will best use their strengths.
Do You Have to Be Friends to Work Well Together?
As a last takeaway from the Carnegie Mellon team research, you do not have to be friends to accomplish a lot as a team. In fact, teams seem to work better if relationships are amicable but not entangled-a healthy sense of cooperation without the drama of being involved in each other's personal lives.
Keep this in mind when you plan team building exercises, retreats, or other "recreational" activities for your employees. Make sure that these activities are structured so that employees can exercise teamwork muscles - like problem-solving and trust - but they have the choice to maintain boundaries between their professional and personal lives for employment longevity.
Less Turnover, Stronger Teams
After you have gathered and synthesized advice from different corporate spheres, how can you tell if your hiring process is working? An easy way to tell is turnover.
Not surprisingly, most workplaces benefit from low turnover, and a public housing agency is no different. The longer employees stay, the more their expertise and reliability deepen.
Many people naturally want to find the most efficient ways to do things - if for no other reason that to shorten their own to-do list. Your employees will likely feel more empowered in this regard as their familiarity with an agency grows over the years. This increased comfort will enable you to collect more candid feedback from employees on how to optimize operations, intentions, and meetings, which is invaluable information for a manager.
More than the Sum of its Parts
Ultimately, you want the individual members of your team to be able to work together as a single organism, in which all of the parts are strengthening each other with their unique perspectives and abilities. While some of this will develop through training and time, it's far easier to find compatible pieces at the outset than to make them gel after the fact. Build your team the right way from the beginning and you're far more likely to be successful in the long run.
References
Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. (2021). "Can Collective Intelligence Be Measured and Predicted" Retrieved from [URL]: https://www.cmu.edu/tepper/faculty-and-research/research/videos/collective-intelligence-anita-woolley.html
GovLoop. (2016). "The Impact and Importance of Teamwork in Government." Retrieved from [URL]: https://www.govloop.com/community/blog/impact-importance-teamwork-government
Housing Futures. (2022). "Running a Public Housing Authority in 2022- 5 Ideas for the New Year- - Housing Futures." Retrieved from [URL]: https://housing-futures.org/2022/01/03/running-a-public-housing-authority-in-2022-5-ideas-for-the-new-year
Goldman, Charles A., Tepring Piquado, J. Luke Irwin, Daniel Allen, Ying Zhou, and Sung Ho Ryu, Recruiting and Hiring a Diverse and Talented Public Sector Workforce. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2021. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1255-1.html.
