A leading U.S. tolling authority had a strategic plan and the ambition to reclaim its standing as an innovator in tolling. What it needed was an organization capable of executing on it: the right workforce, leadership model, and change infrastructure to turn priorities into progress.
Viewed through North Highland's operating model framework, the challenge was not simply workforce related. It cut across leadership, governance, workforce, process, technology, and data, and each one shaped whether the strategy could move forward.
From Operational Support to Workforce Transformation
North Highland’s relationship with the agency began through targeted operational and planning support, impacting both customers and internal ways of working. Those efforts helped the agency get to know North Highland as a trusted partner and gave North Highland a working understanding of the agency’s operating environment, priorities, and culture.
As the work transitioned from planning to executing, it became clear that a strategy would only go as far as the workforce could carry it, and only as far as the organization could track and govern it. Building both became the next focus.
New Leadership. A Real Mandate to Change
New leadership arrived with an understanding of the agency’s standing and a vision for its future. The ambition was specific: modernize the organization, sharpen how it operated, and reestablish the agency as a leader in tolling innovation. North Highland helped translate that direction into a grounded enterprise strategic plan, built on the realities of a newly restructured organization and aligned to what the incoming team was trying to accomplish.
A strategic plan only holds if the organization can track it. To that end, North Highland helped the agency put governance and communications structures in place. This included centralizing tracking tools to give leadership real-time visibility into initiative progress, defining RACI models to clarify accountability, and developing communications materials and templates to keep employees, senior leadership, and the Board aligned as the work moved forward.
A Workforce in Transition
The agency was entering a new phase of growth and organizational development. New leadership, restructured reporting lines, and a more integrated operating model were changing how employees worked, collaborated, and understood their roles. At the same time, long-tenured employees and new hires were experiencing different levels of clarity, trust, and readiness for change.
North Highland helped the agency establish a fact-based view of the employee experience and the workforce conditions shaping transformation. Through an employee engagement assessment, interviews, focus groups, survey analysis, and leadership working sessions, the team identified barriers to effective transformation and developed recommendations to strengthen employee engagement, communication, leadership alignment, governance, culture, HR infrastructure, and change management.
The assessment gave leaders a clearer view of what the workforce needed to move forward: stronger communication, sharper accountability, more consistent ways of working, targeted support to reduce change fatigue, and cultural conditions that reinforced trust across departments.
Making Strategy Executable Through People
The agency’s strategic plan set the direction, but successful execution depended on the workforce’s ability to understand, adopt, and sustain the work. North Highland helped connect strategy to execution by aligning employee engagement insights with strategic initiatives and translating workforce needs into concrete recommendations, roadmap actions, and leadership decisions.
This work gave leaders a clearer picture of where the workforce was aligned, where confusion or resistance could slow progress, and where additional support would help the organization move faster.
The engagement assessments became a direct input into the agency’s broader workforce modernization work, informing governance, communications, leadership alignment, and the transformation roadmap.
When Change Gets Hard, Structure Matters
As modernization efforts expanded, North Highland supported change management across major transformation efforts. In one significant operating model transition, North Highland helped employees understand, absorb, and adopt changes to how work was organized and delivered.
The work also supported the agency’s broader operational excellence and enterprise execution model. North Highland helped shape governance, working norms, leadership coordination, and communication mechanisms designed to improve cross-functional progress and reduce overreliance on a single executive.
This change management support helped the agency move from project-by-project adoption toward a more durable organizational readiness capability. Employees had better context for change, leaders had sharper tools to reinforce expectations, and the organization had better mechanisms to coordinate transformation across functions.
Modernizing HR to Support a Growing Workforce
The agency also recognized that sustained transformation required a more comprehensive HR function and more modern people practices. Its workforce had grown significantly, while HR capabilities, processes, data, and technology had not matured at the same pace.
North Highland conducted an HR maturity assessment to establish a baseline of current HR capabilities across people, processes, technology, and data. The work identified opportunities in strategic workforce planning, process standardization, data and analytics, HR capacity, technology adoption, and policy consistency. It also clarified where HR needed to evolve from primarily administrative support toward a more strategic partner to the business.
From there, North Highland supported future-state visioning, roadmap development, HR transformation planning, and implementation support. This included helping the expanded HR team define its operating model, ways of working, service expectations, governance approach, and early roadmap priorities.
The Work That Outlasts the Engagement
By strengthening workforce strategy, HR maturity, employee engagement, change management, and organizational readiness, North Highland helped the agency build durable infrastructure for sustained change. Leaders, HR, and employees came out of the work with better-defined tools and structures: better mechanisms to align priorities and track progress, a clearer path for HR toward strategic partnership, and more reliable support for employees navigating change. The result was a growing public agency with the workforce capabilities and change structures to modernize with confidence and keep moving on its own.
Across the engagement, North Highland:
- Identified workforce and organizational barriers to transformation
- Aligned workforce priorities with strategic objectives and execution roadmaps
- Designed and implemented change management approaches that improved adoption and sustainment
- Developed strategic communications and governance frameworks to track initiative progress and accountability
- Strengthened leadership alignment and cross-functional coordination
- Assessed HR capabilities and developed a transformation roadmap for a growing HR function
- Designed future-state workforce and HR operating models
- Advanced strategic workforce planning, talent management, and employee experience
- Built internal change capabilities to support ongoing transformation
Foundational work with the agency also included operational improvement, customer experience modernization, planning, strategy development, and procurement support. These efforts established the trusted relationship and operating context that made the broader workforce transformation journey possible. What started as a series of targeted engagements helped build an internal capability the agency could carry forward on its own.
North Highland's Transportation team works with agencies navigating leadership change, workforce transition, and strategies that need stronger execution support. If that's where your organization is headed, let's talk.
