Understanding Motivation - City of Aurora

Experts have said today's economy is the worst the American people have seen since the Great Depression. Major corporations are finding ways to reduce costs, including major layoffs and reorganizational plans of the companies; the City of Aurora is no exception. The City's 2010 budget had to go from $246,400,600 to $231,200,803 which included eliminating 10 vacant positions, 16 transferred positions, 48 filled full time positions and doing a whole reorganization between departments within the General Fund and the remaining full time employees associated with other funds. The employees that were fortunate enough to "dodge" the layoffs for this year have been told by the City Manager that in order to provide the best possible services to the citizens with the resources that are available, the "work more with less" motto has to be implemented across the board. We, as City employees, need to cover more job functions, take on more work and ensure the same amount of efficiency is provided to the citizens with working for less money, furlough days being implemented, future layoffs occurring and training budgets to further career education being cut by more than half. With all that said, finding a motivated career service employee currently working for the City of Aurora that has a high level of job satisfaction is like finding a needle in a haystack; it wasn't like that in the beginning.

In March 2008 I was offered the opportunity from going from the Audit division within the private sector to working for one of the local government entities in the State of Colorado. I was excited, but also extremely nervous because government agencies are known for hiring minorities and people of different cultures and diversities and the corporation I was coming from was more comfortable with keeping people within their homogenous group. Nerves attacked me in the beginning, but knowing I exert the characteristics of getting to know others for who they are and not where they come from or how they look would help me surpass the butterflies and go outside of my comfort zone to welcome the new organizational culture.

I've been with the City for two years and each audit I perform I've made my own personal goal of communicating with as many people from different cultures and seeing how their home country's government operated, how their policies and procedures were implemented and then trying to apply some of their concepts that would be beneficial to the City into a recommendation of the audit report. Being an auditor also entails having numerous amounts of meetings with staff members and executives of all cultures; therefore I take my time to listen to them attentively and confirm they understand my objectives for the audit and I understand how those objectives are being met within their division/department. Working so closely with these individuals and learning and expanding myself on both a personal