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Marcus Holmes – Operations GM at the City of Detroit

In this episode of The 3rd Question we talk with Marcus Holmes – Operations GM at the City of Detroit, Author of “The Gratefulness Journey Everyday: What Are you doing in the next 30 days to transform your life?” as he discusses the evolution of HR, specifically as it relates to process improvement and technology adoption in the public sector space.

 

Video Transcript 

 

 

Ryan:

Hello and welcome to The 3rd Question, a video interview thought series with public sector thought leaders from around the country. Today I'm really excited to be joined by Marcus Holmes. Marcus is the HR operations GM at the city of Detroit. He's also the author of The Gratefulness Journey Everyday: what are you doing in the next 30 days to transform your life? Which I know is available probably on Amazon and other places. So, Marcus, thank you so much for joining me today.

 

Marcus Holmes:

Ryan, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

 

Ryan:

So before we get into our three questions. I always give my guests an opportunity just to give a little bit of an introduction of who you are, what makes you tick the organization you're at and some of the things you're involved with there.

 

Marcus Holmes:

Wonderful. And thank you for mentioning the book. I think if I had a way to get a moniker, I would say I'm grateful, Ryan. I have been with the city of Detroit for over 18 years, about 25 in the HR space total, and I am excited about HR. That's why I self-pronounce the HR passion guy. I'm passionate about people, process and purpose. And I think those three things intersect and have intersected over my journey in HR, which has included just about everything from generalist work to strategic planning, which is kind of part of the role that I do today. So from a talent acquisition and talent management, labor relations, employee relations, all of those various areas of HR and an organization that has gone from having almost 20,000 employees, Ryan, to now about 9,000.

 

Marcus Holmes:

So it's been an interesting journey and wry with lots of twists and turns and I'm excited to currently lead a team that's called the policy planning and operations group. So there's a sliver of policy that we do as it relates to enterprise wide policies. A sliver of that has to do with operations from an internal service provider for HR and our budget of about $14 million. And then there is this planning piece that includes an analytics part of the work that we do to ensure that we're able to offer the right suite of programs and initiatives that drive business.

 

Ryan:

Got it, got it. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on some of these questions that I'm going to throw at you today. So I'll start with that. The first one is knowing that you've had a long career in HR. 25 years is great. And in the public sector vertical, it's different than private sector. I would love to hear your thoughts and perspectives on kind of the evolution of HRs specifically what's been going on as it relates to process improvement, technology adoption.

 

Ryan:

That's been really happening in the public sector space, probably a little took a little longer for some of those changes happening in public sector than it did in the private, but it has been expedited and obviously the last year and a half, two years forced some of those changes because of people being home shore, not being able to come to an office, et cetera [inaudible 00:03:26], but in general, I would just love to hear what your thoughts are around that evolution of HR.

 

Marcus Holmes:

Yeah, I think pretty similar to what you will see in the world, Ryan, HR has gone from more of a administrative and personnel management. Which you're right, public sector tends to lag a little bit behind industry, but I think we have that in common where it was very transactional and we relied on it to be that expert in transactions as it related to HR and to the law. As I'm drawing the circle, Ryan, I'm thinking as the circle being the boundaries of the law, but inside is the sweet spot, a little circle where we seek to operate and where you see the evolution happening is providing the best practices and best opportunities for employees.

 

Marcus Holmes:

And of course that is in the last 18 months been accelerated by the pandemic, of hybrid work that we had small segments doing telework, determining what essential work is. And in some parts, Ryan, even HR being considered essential workers because we've had to help to counsel and help to guide on the front lines as things have been happening. So I would say the evolution has been largely moving the profession to more strategic and moving the profession to rely more on tools and technology that could help us to bring greater insights to our business partners.

 

Ryan:

So I want to ask you a little bit of a follow-up to that.

 

Marcus Holmes:

Sure.

 

Ryan:

Because what I've experienced and it's changed. And sometimes the change is forced, but is the reluctance to make process changes because, we've always done it this way and it's worked. Why change? And then you mentioned the words best practices. Where is in your opinion, you and your peers, where are you looking for those best practices? Like what sources are you looking at? I mean, obviously there's probably other public sector groups, but are other ways that you look for those best practices.

 

Marcus Holmes:

Absolutely. And there are public sector groups like the IPMA Group, SHRM, of course we will look to. Hacking HR, which is a newer group that is more tech technology focused, across peers with NAAAHR, National Association of African Americans in Human Resources. So a lot of HR organizations, but you also have to look at the business organizations, right? Because with municipalities, which is different than private sector, rather, I was going to get to is most private sectors have multi products. Right, right. But municipalities have multi business lines, right. We are in transportation, but we're in public works. We are in parking. We are in airport services.

 

Marcus Holmes:

So we're in different lines of businesses that you don't find in other organizations. So you've got to look to those lines of businesses as well, when you're thinking about benchmarking. And I would just put the caveat, you've always got to pull in benchmarking, Ryan, to make it organic. So you just can't make what works at Google, make what works at the city of Detroit. So best practices is kind of nebulous to me because you still have to come and right fit it for your organization for what is organic to your culture to drive the future of your business outcomes. And for us that's so that we attract residents and visitors and citizens to work, live, thrive, and play here in the city of Detroit.

 

Ryan:

Got it. Thanks. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about that workforce. You saw talking about attracting the workforce. It's changing rapidly in the public sector space, much faster than the private sector, especially when it comes to the affectionately termed silver tsunami, which I'm getting, as you can see on the side of my head, I'm getting closer and closer to that group. But we know that about 50% of the public sector are able to retire in the next five-ish years or eligible to whether they do it or not.

 

Ryan:

So because of that big change, you've got a lot of thought leadership got a lot of brain drain walking out the door. You've also got the challenge of filling some of those roles, whether it's from internal career development or attracting the next generation into the public sector. So for your role and with such a large city like Detroit, what have you been doing from a strategic perspective to tackle that changing workforce challenge and really attracting the next generation into the public sector?

 

Marcus Holmes:

Yeah. And I hope that I can double back mine to a point that I don't know if I covered in the last bite about the resistance to change, because change is at the speed of change now. And so there has been some resistance to catch up with change, but I don't think overall in the HR profession, we're afraid of change. We're wondering whether the business is ready for the kind of monumental change that's happening because we have to walk with the business through that, right?

 

Ryan:

I totally agree with you. I totally... I talked to HR folks and they're ready to make change, but they've got to get the support of the business. Or as you said, the different lines of the business versus in the city. Yeah, totally.

 

Marcus Holmes:

Yes. Some of them haven't caught up with the speed of change at change is what I call it, because there was some general resistance about having people work from home. Some people didn't believe, "Hey, how could you work from home and kinds of roles?" And it really required us to kind of push back and challenge business about what can really be done from home. And a lot of it had to be done from home. So it's almost like saying now what, right?

 

Ryan:

Right.

 

Marcus Holmes:

We were able to do it. And so now we have to think differently about those resources. But to this last question, I really think that public sector and municipalities have to have this strategic approach to a couple of things, right. We have to look at an intergenerational culture. And the reason that I say that's important is because that 50 something percent and close to 60, in some cases, Ryan, percent of folks that could leave in the next five to seven years are not planning necessarily to leave.

 

Marcus Holmes:

And not all of them are going to be opportunities that they're going to be able to go up the food chain as it were. so we really have to be strategic about employee resource groups, about mentorship opportunities about collaboration, and stretch projects. Because one of the key advantages,, I think of a municipality is what I mentioned these lines of business gives you the opportunity for internal mobility. So someone like me, who's had a great career, 18 years so far, maybe I get an operations opportunity in another area that really isn't a move up the food chain, but it's more lateral move, but it gives me a new opportunity and refreshes my career.

 

Marcus Holmes:

It gives me a re-skilling opportunity. So we have to really be strategic about our investments and re-skilling, and up-skilling, and the review and analysis of workflows and automation, so that we can deconstruct some jobs. Find out through this pandemic what were the things that we saw that we could do differently or do without, and lean out some of those things and then rebuild new jobs and new skills to do other things, right?

 

Marcus Holmes:

So I'll give you just a quick example. Today, we have long since kept in house, our employment verification and personnel file review, which is a small thing to some, but it's big for an employee who wants that file to be sent to the police department, for example, when they are going to apply for a position there. That's something that was a manual process. And we said, okay, let's write down this task and make sure that we can still serve our customers within the timeframe, but automated. Okay. So if we go from that file review, that takes 24 hours and we turn it to 15 minutes. What do we do with that timeframe that that individual had? We re-skill them for other work, right? We determine whether it makes good sense to re-skill them. And I think it's an internal win, Ryan, when you can teach employees new opportunities. It builds your brand, it builds moral.

 

Marcus Holmes:

It builds your culture to say, "We're invested enough in you to see if we can re-skill you." So I think companies and organizations, especially municipalities, have to have some thought about that. And that's the kind of data collection and thought that we're doing now as we're going through this pandemic and saying, "Okay, we've learned a lot about the processes in this pandemic that we found that we could do without, or we could do differently or had to do differently. Now, how do we look at the relationships that support those, the organizational network analysis, right? Is the structure, right? Do we need to deconstruct jobs?"

 

Marcus Holmes:

And then look to see what are the future skills we need as we look at the people who want to leave, how do we attract them to stay if we need them to, so that we don't have that institutional brain drain and that they can train others that are coming. And how do we use them as ambassadors to attract people to public service? Because that's where the challenge sometimes is, it is this image of public service that we're behind or this image of public service that it's not as agile. So it really is using these success stories internally to be able to talk to our candidate and talent pool to say, "This is a great place to work and an employer of choice."

 

Ryan:

Well, and those next generations that are coming into the workforce, they have very different expectations of what their employer provides, whether it's technologically. Like how they interact with you as the employer, whether it's career opportunities, whether it's training, we know that younger generations are not thinking, "I'm going to go to an employer and be there for my whole career." I mean, that's just the fact whether people want to admit or not, that's kind of the mindset.

 

Ryan:

So how are public sector groups approaching that? I mean, I'd ask you guys, how are you looking at that? Also knowing that sometimes it's not going to be... you're not going to be as competitive, maybe on a base salary perspective. I always trigger... I'm out in California. Sometimes I think of the IT world out here, right? And the competition for talent from a technology perspective, public sector groups and municipalities, they can't pay the same as maybe some of the Silicon Valley groups can, however they have other perks that private sector can't provide. So it's communicating that to that next generation. How are you guys looking at that?

 

Marcus Holmes:

So again, I think one of the advantages when you're thinking about millennial talent is we have all of these lines of businesses, right? And so it's important for us to package it one, to show them that there are many opportunities to move, and opportunities for them to lead where there is technology transition, because this is the smartphone world, right? And so putting them on stress chains, giving them opportunity to move and have internal mobility, because we know they may not want to stay in the same role. But if the organization's culture is such that they want to stay in the organization, that there are other opportunities for them to move throughout the organization. I think that's how we counter that and listen, eight, ten years ago, as it relates to a benefits package, I think I paid less than $2 as a premium for my medical benefits.

 

Marcus Holmes:

I'm paying a little bit more than that, but I bet I'm paying a lot less than a lot of the other employers. So our benefits package is what we really try to sell if we see that there is some gap and the talent pool. The gaps have gotten smaller, as it relates to compensation in most of the areas, and we continue to work and benchmark areas where we know are areas of concern as it relates to talent. But it's really getting millennials who have public service at heart who exhibit our core values, getting them into a classification and compensation system where we can teach them, grow them in any area. And so I think those are the things we package to sell to attract and retain millennials.

 

Ryan:

Got it, got it. Well, we're already at the third question and in season two I've been... I'm a props guy... I've been showing a blank check or an infinity check, in this case, written out to your city. And I've been asking my guests, obviously it's [inaudible 00:15:57] time's got a fictitious infinity check, but if you could get a blank check that you could use to better drive your employee education or communication, invest in maybe technology from an HR perspective, what would you use it for and why?

 

Marcus Holmes:

Yeah, and Ryan, it's not quite a blank check because it says city of Detroit, if it were blank, I could put my name in it and then I could-

 

Ryan:

That's why I wrote city of Detroit. That's why I wrote it.

 

Marcus Holmes:

But if we had a blank check, there are so many things to do from really a technology infusion would be necessary for what I consider the employee experience. Because to really personalize the experience when you're thinking of the span of control, the average generalist or employee service consultant has 400 employees, at least, that he or she is responsible for. So managing that and helping departments and people managers manage that you really need a tool to be able to ensure that employees are having the kind of experience and you can touch bases with them.

 

Marcus Holmes:

So I put some resources around employee experience, candidate experience, employee sentiment, and voice, of course, a tool that would help us with organizational network analysis. I think it's very important that we examine how we get results through relationships in our organization. How do we collaborate? How do we ideate? And then how do we take that information, synthesize it, and replicate it in other areas to improve and increase performance.

 

Marcus Holmes:

And so there are tools out there, of course, that I would purchase for that. There are tools out there, of course, I talked earlier about the job specification or job description deconstructing. I think it's Watson Willis has a tool out there that you can ingest job description information, and it will kind of parse and pair that information to see jobs are similar and which processes that you might be able to debunk or revisit. And so those types of things so that we can really do organizational design for the future. I would put a large investment in that. And then I'd look to talk about recognition and rewards and what we recognize and what we reward and how we do it. I think those are large things that I would invest in as well.

 

Ryan:

Well, some great ideas there, and Marcus, I really appreciate you spending a little bit of time with me and our audience today. It's always exciting to hear. I have the opportunity to talk to large organizations in the public sector and smaller, both on the municipal and the education side. I love hearing common themes and common ideas because I can see them propagating really across the vertical as change is happening. And so it's people like you, and it sounds like a lot of these others that I've talked to that really are helping drive some of this change in the public sector. And it excites me to see where things are going. So thank you so much for joining me today and answering these three questions.

 

Marcus Holmes:

Ryan, thanks for having me.

 

Ryan:

And again, to my audience Marcus also is an author. So you can always go to Amazon and find The Gratefulness Journey Everyday: What are you doing in the next 30 days to transform your life? So thank you so much, Marcus. It was a pleasure to talk to you, and I hope you have a great rest of your week.

 

Marcus Holmes:

Thanks Ryan, and thanks to your audience. Have a grateful week.