WEST JORDAN -- It's not always pleasant to deal with a city bureaucracy -- but West Jordan officials plan to spend more than $6,000 over the next few months to ensure residents find their municipal encounters are of the warm and fuzzy kind.
The City Council has agreed to fund a series of "customer service" training workshops for West Jordan employees to help them improve their skills in dealing with the public.Council goals for the program include making city government more user-friendly, improving employee morale, encouraging team-building and problem-solving, and establishing guidelines for how workers should relate to residents.
Each workshop will train a group of 25 to 30 employees using lectures and interactive exercises. Given the size of the city work force, it will take at least 12 to 13 workshops to train all workers.
Council members voted March 2 to award a training contract to Colleen Cook of Positive Impact, a West Jordan resident who specializes in motivational and in-house employee training.
Councilman Jay Bowcutt endorsed the workshops, saying the city needs "an ongoing program . . . with refresher courses" to underscore the importance of dealing with residents in a friendly and consistent manner.
The Council had agreed to the customer service training idea for city employees during a strategic planning conference last fall.
City Manager Dan Dahlgren said that while the city has hosted similar workshops in the past, a continual turnover of employees has eroded the effects of that training.
"We did this about five years ago when I first came to the city, and it was quite helpful," he said. "We found it built camaraderie and energy . . . and a whole new understanding of who our customers really are."
Cook will be paid $500 for each of the training sessions, which will be held every few weeks beginning April 1 with senior staff training.
The workshops will continue through mid-July. The cost will be about $17 per worker.
Refresher or "tune-up" sessions may also be scheduled once all employees have completed their customer-service orientation.
"We want to help residents work through what they may perceive as a bureaucratic maze when they deal with the city," Mayor Donna Evans said last week.
"The council wants to promote a more responsive atmosphere," she said, "by creating an environment where we understand the residents are our customers and where we let citizens know that we're concerned about them."
Evans said the workshops are not a criticism of city employees but are only intended to help them develop skills in customer relations and team-building concepts that will lead to better relations with residents.
"People's individual problems can become lost" in a large organization, the mayor said. "Even if we don't have an answer for their problems, we need to help residents understand why no answer may be immediately available."
Dahlgren said another goal of the program is "to recognize employees who go out of their way to serve our residents."
He also said a cash award will be given to an employee who devises the best slogan expressing the need for teamwork and service.
City officials met with Cook on Monday to lay out the parameters for the first workshop.
West Jordan received seven proposals from various training organizations to conduct the customer service workshops, with the per-employee cost ranging from a high of $380 to a low of $17.