Organizational Effectiveness

The Partnership for Public Service offers expert mission-focused consulting based on our 25 years of working with the public sector.

Our Organizational Effectiveness solutions align strategy, structure and shared processes to improve collaboration, workflows and decision-making, ultimately strengthening service to the American public.

The Partnership has consistently demonstrated the ability to drive organizational change in government through proven results with federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Education, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Federal Housing Finance Agency,

Our services include:

• Organizational Assessments: Gather employee and customer insights and recommendations for improving organizational impact
• Employee Engagement and Performance: Identify and address the challenges that affect employee engagement, retention and performance
• Strategic Planning and Implementation: Create organizational priorities and align on direction for achieving outcomes
• Change Management: Design structured transitions to enable and sustain new ways of working

All offerings and programming can be selected and tailored to meet the individual needs of your organization.

Organizational Assessments

Organizations perform best when they actively listen to employees who carry out the work and customers who depend on their outcomes.

Yet many organizations lack structured ways to capture and translate these insights into meaningful improvements. Our approach helps organizations systematically gather quantitative and qualitative insights from employees and customers about their recommendations for improving organizational effectiveness.

Our services include the following:

• Listening sessions and stakeholder insight summary: We facilitate structured listening sessions and then synthesize qualitative insights into clear themes, recommendations and actionable summaries that inform decision-making.
• Workflow roadmap and gap analysis: We map current operational workflows to identify misalignments, then outline opportunities for improvement that prioritize high-impact changes.
• Internal and external situational analyses: We perform analyses using frameworks such as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental) to evaluate internal strengths and weaknesses alongside external forces to support organizational alignment, strategic planning and other efforts.
• Talent practice maturity model development: We collaboratively design a tailored maturity model that benchmarks the organization’s talent management practices across key capability areas.

Employee Engagement and Performance

For government to best serve the public, it needs a workforce that is committed and engaged in its responsibilities.

For over 20 years we have demonstrated through our Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings how low employee engagement leads to poor customer relationships, high turnover and a lack of productivity—all of which prevent departments from fulfilling their missions.

We have decades of experience working to improve public sector employee engagement, informed by our successful initiatives with agencies across government and an extensive body of subject-matter expertise.

Our proven services include the following:

• Staff survey administration: Using our proprietary Public Service Viewpoint Survey, we gather quantitative feedback from your workforce that points to the key drivers of disengagement and can be benchmarked against relevant federal agencies that we have previous collected data for.
• Employee focus groups: We hold facilitated dialogues with your workforce that help illustrate the challenges and recommendations behind your survey data that will drive organizational change and improved performance for the public.
• Employee engagement action planning workshops: Our action planning workshops convene leaders, supervisors and employees to codevelop internal organizational outcomes and concrete initiatives that respond to staff feedback and improve workplace engagement and performance.
• Engagement initiative implementation: We provide on-the-ground support to effectively implement, evaluate and communicate internally about your internal initiatives to improve organizational performance.

Strategic Planning and Implementation

With ever-changing priorities and resource constraints, public sector leaders must have a clear strategy, measurable outcomes and tangible steps for better service delivery. Our strategic planning and implementation services clarify direction and priorities, so leaders and teams are aligned around shared goals and can translate strategy into coordinated action.

Our services include the following:

• Leadership retreats: We deliver strategic planning retreats tailored to each leadership team’s challenges and opportunities, equipping leaders with a shared strategic vision, clear roles, aligned priorities and a renewed commitment to serving the public good.
• Enterprise-wide or department-specific strategic plan development: We engage leadership and key stakeholders to co-develop a strategy that reflects organizational needs, provides a clear roadmap for the future and develops clear metrics for success.
• Implementation plans: We translate high-level strategic goals into practical plans tailored to specific levels, functions or departments through facilitated working sessions.

Change Management

Organizational change is inevitable, and successful transformation requires more than announcing new initiatives or restructuring processes. Without a thoughtful, structured approach to managing transitions, even well-designed strategies can face resistance, confusion or inconsistent adoption across teams.

Our change management services include the following:

• Change management strategy: We conduct change readiness assessments, identify potential risks and barriers and develop stakeholder engagement plans to ensure the right groups are informed, involved and empowered throughout the process.
• Strategic change communication plan: Our communication strategies ensure leaders deliver timely information through the right channels, building trust and reinforcing the organization’s vision for the future.
• Change management workshops: We facilitate practical, action-oriented sessions to help the leaders, managers and employees that are driving or impacted by change initiatives understand their role in the change process, proactively address concerns and reinforce behaviors that sustain new ways of working.

For more information on any of our offerings, please reach out to: training@dev.ourpublicservice.org.