Six-month-old Seattle company serves as subcontractor on state HR consulting venture

(Correction: Tandem Motion does not have a contract with the state, the Department of Administration says. It is a subcontractor to a firm that received a no-bid contract with the state. Details on why I wrote what I did are here.) I have also reposted the response from Administration Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka.)

Here is a revised version of the original post:

A new Seattle company called Tandem Motion, which registered as a limited liability company with the state of Washington on May 17, owned by Cara and Kurt Griffith, has a subcontract on a state human resources consulting contract.

The company registered with the state of Alaska on Oct. 5. It doesn’t have an office in Alaska, just a registered agent in Kenai. The company says it is a “workforce strategy consulting firm.”

Cara Griffith served on the “Human Resources Enterprise Business Model Steering Committee,” an effort by Administration Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka to revamp HR for the state. The proposed model was summarized this way, according to an Oct. 14 email to state officials. There are similarities between the new plan and this study from 2009.

The project is in response to an administrative order from the governor to streamline HR activities. The review identified “70 HR process inefficiencies.”

One other task Cara Griffith is working on is a pilot project at the Department of Environmental Conservation to try to improve the employee evaluation process.

The pilot project is to add a second round of state employee evaluations, on top of regular annual evaluations. Griffith told DEC employees the goal is to eventually have a single system that is better.

“It’s gonna feel clunky and there’s gonna be a little bit of tension there and it’s not gonna be ideal, but again we’re about positive change and we want something that’s going to be sustainable for the future, that’s gonna help us and the future generations to come,” she said.

Griffith said her state contract with the administration department ends Dec. 20, which is the day that preparations for the 2020 pilot project are to end, according to one of her slides. She said the DEC project is not part of the contract with the administration department, but said she is involved because she cares about DEC employees and wants them to be successful. She said DEC was drafted into the process.

The jargon-heavy presentation included such comments as, “Evaluate employees based on metrics, not seat time.”

There is skepticism among some employees about the point of this exercise, which is to include “performance expectation conversations” with DEC employees from Dec. 2-20. All DEC employees were asked to attend a recent meeting in person or online to hear about the project from Griffith and DEC Commissioner Jason Brune. Here is the video of that meeting.

Brune said the department has a high turnover rate, about 21 percent a year, and he wants to find ways to encourage employees to stay longer.

One DEC employee told me that it’s not clear how a new evaluation system would encourage people to stay, “as they will not address some very clear problems—the private sector and the federal government pay more—and they have cut staff so much that most people feel like they cannot keep their heads above water.”