State Land Office wins Top Workplace award again with its ‘high-quality employees’

For the second year in a row, the New Mexico State Land Office has won a Top Workplaces award.

The recognition is part of the 2024 Top Workplaces awards, based on results from employee survey firm Energage.

The State Land Office has been raking in awards over recent years. Earlier this year, USA Today named the State Land Office one of the top workplaces in the country. Energage also gave the agency a Woman-Led Organizations Award in 2023.

The office was ranked as the No. 2 midsize company in the state.

“The work that we’re doing is being reflected back to us by these third party recognitions,” Public Lands Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard told the Journal.

Garcia Richard highlighted her office’s record-breaking revenue and work done to get oil and gas companies to clean up and remediate abandoned sites. She said the agency only gets all of that accomplished if staff are in a healthy workplace environment.

“We have to ensure that staff is properly compensated, we have low turnover, people are committed, people want to be at the land office,” she said. “And there’s a built-in mission that we have that people love when they come to work for us.”

When Garcia Richard came into the land office five years ago, she said, she prioritized two things: parity and work-life balance for her employees.

She said there was a lot of disparity in how people were getting paid, specifically those with many years of experience at the agency compared to those who hadn’t been there long.

“We tried to right-size all their positions and their salaries,” Garcia Richard said.

The office also implemented 40 hours of administrative leave to use for things like childcare or health appointments, she said.

That’s in addition to earned vacation and sick leave as well as parental leave.

State Land Office employees can work up to three days from home per week and can have flexible schedules around educational degrees.

“We really try to work with people on their needs through our policies,” Garcia Richard said.

The commissioner boasted about the commitment and perseverance of her agency’s Human Resources staff, who often have to go through multi-step processes with different state departments to get paperwork done.

The Society of Human Resource Management recently named Selena Romero, assistant commissioner of administrative services at the State Land Office, HR professional of the year.

Garcia Richard said the State Land Office has one of the lowest turnover rates among state agencies, at an average 1% monthly turnover rate. The office has 187 employees.

It’s not easy work, either.

Staff in positions like district resource managers can often get paid at a much higher pay in the private sector, like the oil and gas industry, Garcia Richard said. That makes it difficult to retain professionals in the southeast part of the state, she said.

So the State Land Office, with legislative approval, increased pay for the role and expanded the positions to avoid burnout. Garcia Richard said district resource manager positions are fully staffed for the first time in the history of the land office.

“We’re recruiting high-quality employees for especially hard-to-fill positions,” she said.

And with the oil and gas industry ramping up productivity, Garcia Richard said, workload only increases for the State Land Office employees.

“What we really, really want to avoid is burning out our employees,” she said, “and I think the way to do that is to have enough positions, so that people are not doing double work, and having those positions filled.”

Energy industries tend to be male-dominated, and Garca Richard said she’s made a point to ensure qualified, diverse candidates are hired at the land office, especially in leadership roles.

“If you look at the folks I get to appoint — my leadership team of the assistant commissioners — you’ll find a pretty profound diversity there, of perspectives, really,” she said. “I mean, when you diversify staff, you diversify the perspective that that staff is bringing.”