Leading an All-Remote Workforce in Maricopa County, Ariz.

As CIO of Maricopa County, Ariz., Richard McHattie oversees an entirely remote workforce. This has contributed to a high level of employee satisfaction — exit interviews are rare these days — as well as a record-low vacancy rate.

1. How has the transition to fully remote work been?

We can’t use the word “transition” anymore. We’ve been entirely remote since the pandemic. The big question at one point was, “Can we continue to work remote?” Working remote is extremely important to our employees, so I’ve carried it forward.

We’re about tracking outcomes and project deliveries. I’ve always thought you don’t have to watch over your folks, even when they’re onsite. Supervisors shouldn’t be standing in their cubes, watching their work. We’ve embraced that on a larger scale, and we’re achieving several million dollars’ worth of cost reductions as we consolidate from leased buildings to our own.

Really for me, it came down to “What do our employees want?” Often as leaders, we think about what we want versus what they want. My employees want the flexibility to work from home. Our stats show we’re right. Right now we have the lowest vacancy rate we’ve had in my 21 years with the county. We don’t have many exit interviews.

2. What are some challenges of managing such a big IT workforce?

I have an incredible executive team, and one of the leading priorities for us is being employee-centric. We’re hiring great talent and then empowering them to take calculated risks. We have a bold-but-calculated philosophy, where every employee is empowered to make decisions, push initiatives and propose things we can do better as an organization.

We have about 300 employees, but it doesn’t feel like 300, except when we have our all-hands meetings. But I meet with every new employee. We schedule 30 minutes and usually go for an hour. I welcome them, make sure their onboarding has been what they expected and we get a chance to know each other. I also try to reach out through Teams chat to employees on a monthly basis to check in.

They can talk about county priorities, things they’re seeing in our environment or anything else. Oftentimes we start talking muscle cars, new movies on Netflix, or weddings and grandchildren.

3. How do you choose the right AI tools for Maricopa County?

We have about 55 departments, so we have many different lines of business, everything from public health to the fiduciary to human services. We evaluate AI on its enterprise value, and we ask how tools could be applied across all our departments, whether it’s repetitive data entry or intelligent document processing. Our approach stems from what we call “distributed innovation.” We’ve created an innovation hub, led by Chief of Innovation and Emerging Technologies Aaron Judy and his team. It’s a central place on our intranet where departments can request new innovations.

We were the first county to adopt ChatGPT enterprise in October 2024. With AI, we always consider the security of our data and the safety of our constituents.

4. How do you approach introducing new tools?

We refer to it now as organizational change management, or OCM, and it’s a practice we set up a little over a year ago. Once we know what technology we want to roll out, how we roll it out becomes critical. We leverage our department contacts and internal technology leads to facilitate the OCM process. We’ve also invested a lot in training hubs for people who want to be familiar with Microsoft Copilot, and we hold town halls, as well as lunch and learns, where anyone can share stories about how they’re leveraging ChatGPT or other tools. There’s a lot of organic collaboration.