A CONVERSATION WITH DIRECTOR ED LAKE - NEW BEGINNINGS: THE OUTLOOK FOR OKDHS 

Sheree Powell: Hi. I am Sheree Powell with the Office of Communications. And I'm here again today with our new Director, Ed Lake. Ed thanks for joining us today. So you've been on the job a couple of months now. What are you hearing an learning that's affecting your vision for the agency as we approach the future? 

No Audio: Ed Lake û Director, Oklahoma Dept. of Human Services

Director Ed Lake: Well I think the first thing I would like to comment on is what I have seen as the resiliency of this organization. And what I mean by that is really counting back twelve months, one year in the life of Oklahoma DHS. You've had the retirement of a long-time director. You've had the retirements of other key officers with the department. Had the children's rights organization lawsuit settled. The Pinnacle Plan developed. Three divisions reorganized. Decision made to move forward with the closing of the resource centers. And you've had a change in governance, voted on by the citizens of the state. And you have a new director. All in the space of twelve months. To me it's amazing that an organization this size, going through that much change, is still standing here. It's a credit to the people in this organization, the managers that have persevered, done the best they could under extremely difficult situation. 

Ms. Powell: You spoke recently at the History Center about new beginnings and about how reorganization gives our agency an opportunity to remake itself. Why don't you talk a little bit about that? 

Director Lake: Well many employees have said to me, "We're really glad, you know, we have a director now. Things can settle down, so to speak." Well what I am trying to say is this isn't the time for us to settle down.  That we've experienced this difficult, uncomfortable, in some ways negative changes, but we now have this wonderful opportunity, once in a lifetime to do some things that will remake the organization in a way that we all want it to be. So that we regain the trust and credibility of people outside the department, that we engage our stakeholders in new ways, that we engage our employees in new ways and support them better, and that we improve our service to our clients and our clients' access to us. 

Ms. Powell: One of the first things you did as director is you hit the road and you traveled around the state and held these listening sessions. You really wanted to hear from employees and key stakeholders. Tell us why you felt that was important to do. 

Director Lake: Well I really wanted to do that because being brand new to Oklahoma, not only do I not know much about Oklahoma, but I certainly didn't know enough about the department, its employees, its concerns. And then also I knew coming in that there were a lot of issues with our stakeholders, our contractors, people who care about what we do. And I thought, "How in the world am I ever going to catch up with people and understand really what's going on?" And I thought it's not the perfect way, but it's a very quick way to meet and hear from as many stakeholders and employees as I possibly could in a short period of time. I also knew that the legislative session was coming up and that my time might be constrained and that this was an opportunity I wanted to take advantage of and I'm very glad I did that. 

Ms. Powell: At these sessions we heard from Foster Parents and providers and contractors and a lot of different groups that interact with DHS and one of the most common concerns that we heard from them was that we need to improve our communication to these groups. Talk a little bit about how important you think communication is to our agency. 

Director Lake: Well it was a huge common theme all across the state inside and outside the department. Communicate better between the divisions as you said, but employees also want us to communicate better. And I've already seen where we have gaps and issues there, but the ironic thing is that, for example, communicating with employees is really a two-way street. We found out on our listening tours that many employees were not taking advantage of the great communication methods that you already have in place. That people don't think they have time to check the Infonet out or they didn't read the email that went to everybody. Well it works both ways. As we've tried to communicate better with our employees, our employees also need to take advantage of the opportunities they have for hearing from us. When you get outside the department - contractors and stakeholders - they feel that, right or wrong, they feel that we have made decisions or we create programs or we change services and then we sort of tell them how they fit and what they need to do. Rather than bringing them to the table first, talking about where we might go, mutual goals, ideas about how we might get there together and then implement the program or service. So I think we need to change our approach with our stakeholders. And then the danger in the reorganization that really is a benefit to us because we have people in the same line of business, shall we say, reporting to each other which streamlines the operations, but the downside is we're going to have to be careful that we don't have these silos where Child Welfare never talks to DDSD and nobody talks to Family Services and so on. So we're going to have to really work hard to make sure that we know how we relate to each other and how we should relate to each other inside the department. 

Ms. Powell: We also heard a lot about improving customer service. We heard it from our stakeholders and we also heard it from our employees. How do you view customer service as we move ahead?

Director Lake: First of all that was very heartening to hear employees all across the state worried and concerned about workloads and working conditions, but not just about themselves but about how it affected their ability to help their clients. There is a real sense of caring that we need to channel.  We need to do everything we can to free up our employees, to project that caring. As I've said a million times, we're not going to convince anybody that we care or that we're a different organization just by saying it. We're going to have to do things differently and we're going to have to perform better in order to regain trust and the respect of our clients and the people who care about what we do. 

Ms. Powell:  From our employees one of the most common concerns we heard was about pay raises. And although you have no control over employee compensation, why don't you talk about what you have been doing? YouÆve been advocating with the Governor and the legislature about these issues. 

Director Lake: My perspective, coming from outside Oklahoma, is that, and it's not that unusual, state governments do this all the time all over the place, things... tough budget years come about. That always happens. And then there's a tendency when you're cutting back to not pay attention to issues, not fund them, and then you just sort of gradually don't fund them the next year and the year after. Well that's what's happened with state employee pay here in Oklahoma. We've gone too many years really with no increases. Well that is a terrible thing to happen. 

And I guess what I would promote is that we try to address these issues incrementally. Whether it's employee salaries or even provider rates. That we have to work to figure out how to make the small increases that we can afford, but do them regularly so that seven years down the road we don't have this sort of crisis with the salaries. We're going to... we're already loosing good people to the private sector and if we want state government to function well we have to have good people in our employment to help us do that. 

Ms. Powell:  One of the other most common concerns we heard from our employees was about workloads and expectations. The demand for our services is at an all-time high and we have the fewest amount of employees that we've had in almost a decade. Why don't you talk a little bit about how you plan to address the workload issues? 

Director Lake: That's a very difficult question. You've got Child Welfare where it took an awful crisis for the state to marshal the resources to address the problems. And so we're getting more positions in Child Welfare. We don't want there to be an awful crisis in every program just to get more positions. But there's not going to be a ground swell at the legislature to give us more positions in other areas now. So what does that mean?  That means we have to figure out how to keep that workload manageable some other way. The ôsome other wayö could be to reduce paperwork and redundancy and we really need to work on that. 

I heard that everywhere I went as well. So what are we subjecting ourselves to that makes the work more difficult? How do we streamline what we're doing by analyzing every step of our processes and changing them for the better.  And then the other lynch pin in addressing high workloads and high volume of course is technology. We are behind the eight ball there as well. With antiquated systems, they're on their last legs. That's something we're going to have to tend to and tend to as soon as possible to help us manage the work we have. 

Ms. Powell:  One of the other comments we heard from our employees was about having a defined career path. We're losing employees who either get burned out or they feel like they've hit a glass ceiling and they have no place to go. How would you like to address that?

Director Lake: Couple of things there. I agree that that would be a good thing for us to try to do. That if you don't have a career path sooner or later you're going to be, you're burned out, you're not challenged and you could offer more. You don't have a chance for promotional increases and so on. So there's a salary piece of that. 

On the other hand it's a difficult task because to make steps within, job titles for example, I believe that you must make those differences something that you can measure. It's not enough just to bring people from a one to a two to a three to a four let's say for example just because you've been around for three years, five years or ten years. That there ought to be higher expectations for performance, for workload, for skills or for education, or in some combination, that would help you meet the requirements of that new job. But again I think that's something that we can work on, but remember that has a fiscal impact as well. People are going to want to be paid more of course for being at higher levels and we'll have to figure out how to budget for that. 

Ms. Powell:  You know we heard from several areas of the state that many of our county offices are in poor condition. And we really need to figure out what we're going to do with those offices. How would you like to address those? That's going to take a lot of money. 

Director Lake: That's first things first. We have all this influx of new child welfare positions. So that's putting pressure on a number of offices were just running out of space. So that's priority one. Figure out how to make those arrangements and get people in adequate office space with the new positions we're adding. But after that, then we have to turn our attention by doing an assessment of all of our office space. What are the needs in terms of the condition of the offices, the how over-crowded it may be in those offices and then start figuring out how we can address those in turn. And our folks are working really hard to identify those offices now.

Ms. Powell:   Well now that you've had some time to digest what you've heard at all of these listening sessions, what are your next steps? 

Director Lake: That was a real benefit of the listening sessions to hear all of these issues coming up gave me a sense of how people think the department ought to be like. And also it gives me an idea of some of the action items that we should be trying to address to reach those goals, that vision if you will. So we're working with the senior executives of this department to distill these ideas and suggestions and then turn that into a vision and a strategic plan for the department. And when I say strategic I don't mean ten years out. I mean a few years out.  These are things that we have got to start working on right away if we're going to get where we need to go. 

The first thing we're going to take a look at is to systematically review all of the department's functions. Whether that's personnel, or finance, or our program areas, our IT work. It's just a process of me asking and everyone else asking that question of ôWhy?ö Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better way to do this? And that will then begin to bring up all kinds of specific actions that we need to take to improve the department. 

The second thing I think it's important is to do some of the things we just finished talking about and that's working on employee working conditions and by that I mean that broadly. I don't mean just environmental working conditions, but issues of how our payroll functions, how we treat employees, how we support employees as a management team. All of those kinds of things go into improving working conditions for our employees. 

The next item I think we need to address, that we've also discussed, is how do we put into action a goal of better involving our contractors and stakeholders? And the development of our policies and planning and how we deliver our services. And I think there are areas where we're doing a very good job of that and that's a good model for us to implement where we can improve that picture. 

I think the other important issue, again to be repeating ourselves, that we need to enhance our IT systems. We've got to shore up what we have and improve upon that picture.  And come up with new technological solutions to help our workers meet the demands of the work. Because again, probably not going to get a lot more people to do it. So we're going to have to be a lot more clever about how we approach our work. There's an expectation outside, and one that I share, and that's to improve the accountability and transparency as people call it of the department. There's an expectation that we let people see how we do things, and why we do things, and what we're doing. I think that's to our benefit. I know it can make people feel uneasy and yes you do open yourself to second guessing or to criticism. But I think at the end of the day when people better understand why we do what we do and how we do it, that it will benefit the department and increase the trust level and credibility that we have with the outside world. 

Last I would say that we want to move boldly into measuring our performance, holding ourselves accountable, developing performance-based contracts, using more... relying on evidence based practices to drive what we do. In other words you know, what does research show? Is this practice something that has shown its worth? And if so that's what we should be doing. Rather than sort of making it up as we go. Not that we're doing that, but using more evidence-based practice to guide our operations. I would like to say sort of in closing that I want to challenge all of DHS. 

And I say that by looking in the mirror, too and challenging myself: that if we want to be a different DHS, then each of us has to begin doing things differently. You know the old saw, you can't expect change and then keep doing the same things the same way. So all of us are going to have to look in that mirror and decide that we want this organization to be different. And that we can do something about that - each and every one of us - by changing the way we do things. Changing the way we act towards clients, towards each other. And we can do that. But it's not going to be easy. It's going to take a while. But I have high hopes that that's what will happen here. 

Ms. Powell:  Well we certainly have our work cut out for us after all we've talked about today. Thank you very much for being here with us. I'm sure we will be talking more about these issues in the months ahead as we figure out how to address all of these things that we've heard. Thank you all for joining us today. If you would like to read more about the Director's listening sessions we have the entire document posted on our website. You can read about all of the comments that we received. And we'll be following up more with you in the future. Director Lake has also asked us to set up a special place where you can continue to communicate with him. If you have further issues or concerns you would like him to know about look for the "Ask Ed" icon on our website. Thank you again for being with us today and we'll see you next time.