Learning to Embrace Citizen Complaints

Turn that frown upside down and learn from citizen complaints.


Working in the public sector is an exalted calling but it isn’t all cupcake dust and fairy poo. One of the things that makes work in local government challenging are citizen complaints. It can be hard to listen to someone question your competency, honesty, integrity, intelligence and even the very existence of your job. The temptation is to tune out the complaints and dismiss the owner of the grievance as misinformed and disturbed.

 

However, if you can look past the personal attacks and look at the complaint as feedback, it can be a powerful paradigm shift for making things better within the organization. There will always be people who philosophically disagree with whatever thing we’re doing. There isn’t much we can do about that. There are no final answers to philosophical disputes.

But there are a good percentage of complaints that have merit and at the very least should get us to question our systems and operations to make sure we’re doing things in the best possible way for the best possible reasons.

In the words of the great Dr. Deming:

Unsolicited customer complaints are your best customers because they value your product or organization so much that they take the time [out] of their day to call you or write to you to give you their feedback.

It will take practice and good judgement to sift through complaints and separate the valuable feedback from the philosophy but it will be worth it.

In the early stages of designing the All-Together Playground we received some complaints from concerned citizens about how the playground was laid out. Our initial reaction was to dismiss the complaints because this playground was designed by a professional with decades of experience. On what basis could these citizens question a playground design master? Well to make a long story short, we put aside the egos and truly gave this valid and sincere complaint the consideration it deserved. These citizens were completely right. Making this change dramatically improved the design and functionality of the park.

In fact, the whole reason the ATP even exists is because the city listened to a couple of “complaints” from a pair of mothers who had no playground where their daughters in wheelchairs could play. Now we’ve got one of the best all-ability playgrounds in Utah. It has become the most used and beloved park in the city and we know for a fact that there are families who drive more than 3 hours just to come and enjoy what started as a simple complaint on Facebook.