This interview is with Thomas Faulkner, Founder & Principal Consultant at Faulkner HR Solutions.

Thomas Faulkner, Founder & Principal Consultant, Faulkner HR Solutions

As a founder and principal consultant at Faulkner HR Solutions, can you share your background in public sector HR and what led you to specialize in HR innovation?

In the private sector, you can throw money at a problem and displace inefficiencies with resource-heavy interventions rather than structural reform. In the public sector, you don’t get that cushion. Every hire, every policy, every training dollar is under a microscope, and you’re still expected to deliver essential services without fail. Outdated policies create frustration and liability while understaffing slows work, burns people out, and risks public safety. That tension is what drew me into HR innovation. I wanted to understand how strategy and operations could be improved when you’re operating under budgetary restrictions, regulations, and limited resources, and my consulting work has focused on precisely that. How can we help position leaders to build people systems that are lean, compliant, and resilient, but also human enough that employees want to stay? My dissertation examined that issue in depth, and the real lessons came from years of navigating these challenges with boots on the ground.

How has your journey in the public sector HR space shaped your approach to innovation and problem-solving?

My time in the public sector shaped me by removing the illusion of endless resources. That environment taught me that HR doesn’t need more theory; it, instead, demands that solutions actually change how people work tomorrow. Innovation, for me, isn’t about building another model to admire on paper or slapping a trademark on a framework. It’s about stripping ideas down to what’s usable under real constraints: policies that hold up in court and in practice, performance systems managers can actually run, and employee relations processes that don’t wait for a crisis. Problem-solving in the public sector made me relentless about practicality — if it can’t survive tight budgets, limited staff, and heavy compliance, it isn’t innovation.

You’ve mentioned the importance of authenticity in marketing. How does this principle apply to public sector HR, particularly when it comes to employee engagement and retention?

Authenticity in HR works the same way it does in marketing, government relations, and in leadership. People can smell when you’re faking it. Your employees, stakeholders, and constituents know the difference between a leader who is invested in them and one who is just checking a box or quoting a playbook. I’ve watched millions of dollars wasted on engagement programs serve to only hide and not solve the real problems. You can’t buy loyalty when the work itself is broken. Your employees aren’t fooled, and neither am I.

In your experience, what’s the most overlooked area for innovation in public sector HR, and how can organizations start addressing it?

The most overlooked area is the most obvious: stop talking and start listening. Know the pulse of your workforce and the environment you’re operating in. It all starts with intentional presence. Hold listening sessions, walk the floor, and cut the surveys you never act on. Innovation starts there; everything else is noise.

You’ve encountered surprising bottlenecks in healthcare organizations. What’s a unique challenge you’ve faced in public sector HR, and how did you innovate to overcome it?

Public sector HR tells a tale as old as time. You’ve got Susan with 20 years of institutional knowledge that isn’t captured in any policy or procedure. Her retirement party is a crisis in disguise. Once she leaves, the city scrambles because no one knows the systems she managed or the workarounds she built to keep operations running. The innovation wasn’t to develop another training program that would collect dust on a shelf after its use, but to design a better, competency-based knowledge transfer process that eliminated the vanishing knowledge and experience lost in translation between what people actually do and what the policy says they should do. That’s the real challenge in public sector HR, and solving it means redesigning processes that close the gap between what is written and what is real.

How have you adapted recognition approaches in the public sector to meet the needs of different generations, particularly Gen X and Millennials?

Recognition in the public sector can’t be one-size-fits-all, and it definitely can’t be lip service. Gen X wants purpose and stability, and millennials want the same authenticity but with visibility. It’s not difficult, nor is it costly, to provide recognition that is timely, specific, and public enough to feel real without being theater. Recognition has to be authentic and grounded in the reality of their work.

You’ve emphasized the importance of clear, non-contradictory policies. Can you share a specific example of how you’ve helped a public sector organization streamline their HR policies and what impact it had?

I recall my work with a city in South Central Texas, where the employee handbook read like a patchwork quilt. Just as you can see the layers in sedimentary rock, you could trace policies written by different hands across decades. Comically, each addition was padded with its own flavor of legalese. One section outlined a progressive discipline framework that highlighted employee tardiness, while older sections still carried zero-tolerance clauses. Not to mention, the same discipline section cited employees for a written warning if they failed to rewind the VHS training tapes. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for that boss. With the confusing and outdated material, the handbook was more than just inefficient: it was a liability.

When I stepped in, my goal was to eliminate the contradictions and rebuild the handbook into a unified, defensible framework that managers felt comfortable both referencing and navigating. From there, the city began to see immediate results in the consistent and quantifiable application of policies, as evidenced by the sharp reduction in the number of grievances.

How do you approach feedback and performance management in the public sector, where traditional incentives might be limited? Can you provide an example of an innovative approach you’ve implemented?

In the public sector, you cannot leverage taxpayer money to give bonuses as incentivization, so performance management has to run on clarity and accountability. The narrative I push for cities to adopt is to replace the redundant, check-the-box annual reviews with a competency-based model that ties feedback directly to real job behaviors across five domains: Core Functions, which evaluate how well employees fulfill the fundamental duties of their role; Integrated Metrics, which provide objectivity through measurable performance indicators; Value Alignment with Civic Goals, which ties individual contributions to the broader mission of public service; Impact Measurement on Stakeholders, which considers how an employee’s work affects both internal teams and the community; and Collaborative Growth, which shifts the process forward by emphasizing development and alignment with future city needs. Every city deserves a framework managers can actually use and employees can clearly grow from.

Looking ahead, what do you see as the next big frontier for innovation in public sector HR, and how can leaders prepare for it?

The silver tsunami is coming whether you are ready or not. Public-sector HR is about to face a wave of retirements that will drain decades of institutional knowledge almost overnight. The next big move isn’t another platform or the expansion of AI displacing jobs. It’s capturing knowledge before it walks out the door. Leaders need to stop assuming policies capture reality and start designing systems that document how the work actually gets done. Prepare now by mapping competencies, building succession pipelines, and creating intentional structures for knowledge handoff. If you wait until people walk out the door, it’s too late.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

The CIVIC model isn’t a sell. It is an openly available model that actually won a rural city I was working with the 2025 Texas Municipal Human Resources Association HR Impact Award of Distinction. I am the man with the top hat.