A question from an employee
My 2022 fellowship with the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics started with a question a City worker asked Mayor Wu on the Orange Line: what was Boston doing to support employee mental health?
My assignment was to map the support already available to the City’s workforce and recommend what could improve it. I treated it as an organizational question as well as a benefits question. Access to counseling mattered, and so did what it was like to work on a team every day.
Look at resources and working conditions together
I mapped employee benefits and support programs, talked with City staff and leaders, and compared approaches across 14 cities, including conversations with wellbeing leaders in Portland and San José.
Resident-facing teams raised questions a benefits inventory couldn’t answer. How did coworkers support each other? How did managers respond after a difficult interaction? What could a team change about its own ways of working?
I shared the public side of the argument in Exploring wellbeing in the public sector workforce, published by New Urban Mechanics in August 2022.
Give the recommendations a starting point
My final report laid out three opportunities: a strategic approach to individual wellbeing support, backing for employee-led initiatives, and culture and peer-support work with frontline teams. I turned those into proposed responsibilities, first-year priorities, and a process for bringing the right people together.
What I delivered
The fellowship produced a map of the City’s existing supports, comparative research, and recommendations for leadership. The line at the top of my research notes still sums it up: “We cannot manufacture care, it has to be about building true human connection.”