State and local government agencies can't pause for budget cycles or reorganizations. The services they deliver are essential for keeping communities healthy and safe with work like testing for disease outbreaks, processing eligibility for public assistance, and maintaining the data systems that health and human service program runs on.
They do all of it with workforce structures that were built for a different era:
Roles defined around legacy processes rather than how the work gets done
Funding formulas tied to historical staffing patterns that lock in yesterday's headcount instead of flexing for today's needs
Decisions that still follow annual budget cycles while technology changes continuously
North Highland has worked alongside many state agencies facing these types of challenges across workforce development, financial sustainability, staffing models, and governance.
A state department of health had invested significantly in upgrading its data infrastructure, but the systems were ahead of the workforce. Staff across the departments divisions and county health regions were working with tools they didn't know how to use to their full potential. Leadership wanted to better understand the gaps in knowledge before coming up with a strategy to upskill their staff.
North Highland ran 24 focus groups across the department, then designed an assessment that reached nearly 5,000 of the department's 14,000 employees. The assessment was tailored by role, from front-line staff to executives, and the findings were consistent.
The shortest gaps were among mid-level professionals and supervisors, the people whose jobs depend on turning data into action.
That finding shaped everything that followed. The team identified six core data literacy competencies, mapped them to 45 job functions across the department, and built a training plan pointing staff toward more than 40 targeted courses. They also assembled an HR toolkit that embedded data literacy into hiring, onboarding, and managing staff in data-oriented roles, so the department wouldn't have to start from scratch the next time a position turns over.
A state public health district had grown steadily for years, taking on new programs, funding streams, and staff without ever revisiting how the organization was built to support that growth. Roles had accumulated instead of being intentionally designed. Decision-making ran on relationships and institutional memory instead of clearly defined and documented processes. There was no consistent way to connect day-to-day activity to staffing, resources, or performance. When a new district health director stepped into the role, there was no baseline for making strategic decisions.
North Highland conducted an organizational assessment alongside a leadership onboarding review, comparing the district's formal operating model to how it functioned. The gap between the two was significant and visible with unclear ownership over key decisions, reporting lines that didn't reflect how work moved, and no structured link between the district's activities and the resources behind them.
For an incoming director trying to lead effectively from day one, that ambiguity wasn’t just an inconvenience, it was a significant obstacle.
The North Highland team delivered a redesigned operating model that defined roles and reporting lines, clarified who owned which decisions, and tied staffing and activity to performance in a simple, workable way. The result gave district leadership, and the incoming director in particular, a structure that could be understood and managed from the start.
In states where counties administer public assistance programs on their own, funding equity is a persistent problem. One western state had no consistent formula for calculating how much each county needed to do the job. That gap looked different county by county, but the underlying problem was the same.
The money wasn't tied to the work.
North Highland ran a multi-phase project to build a workforce funding model from the ground up. In week one, the team stood up stakeholder advisory boards that brought state agencies and county representatives together, so the model would reflect real conditions instead of assumptions made in a conference room. From there, they selected 10 model counties as the data foundation, gathering FTE, salary, and workload data that could be extrapolated across the full county set, and interviewed officials from six comparable states to identify what worked elsewhere and what to avoid.
The resulting funding model adapts as conditions change and refreshes as new data comes in. It ties every county's funding to what it takes to administer the program.
For another western state with state-administered benefits, North Highland helped the agency achieve a 16.1% increase in workforce capacity through targeted process improvements. Changes to rights-and-responsibilities recordings cut processing time by more than half, and a shift toward continuous eligibility for certain medical programs reduced formal redetermination volume. These were operational decisions, not technology upgrades, made possible by a workload model that gave leadership the data to act with confidence.
Across public health training, health department organization assessments, and public assistance program funding, modernization sticks when there is data that can inform decision making in addition to the tools that can make it happen.
The technical problem is rarely just technical.
North Highland brings a combination that is uncommon in public sector consulting: subject matter experts who understand how HHS programs and funding work, depth in workforce and organizational optimization, financial and operational analysis, and the ability to engage stakeholders in ways that build trust and avoid resistance. Each of these engagements left agencies with something they could operate independently after the work ended.
For state and local agencies managing workforce change, that's the difference between a project and a capability.
Ready to put that capability to work in your agency? Contact North Highland's public sector team to start the conversation. Let's talk.