‘They’re our greatest asset’: NM State Land Office ranks No. 3 in Top Workplaces midsize category

A connection to public land and an employee-prioritized workplace is what compels staff to join and stay at the New Mexico State Land Office.

The public agency is ranked No. 3 in the midsize category of Top Workplaces. It marks the third consecutive year the State Land Office has garnered a place on the list.

The office has been around for more than a century and employs 180 people, offering benefits like telework, at least 10 days of paid vacation leave and 13 days of paid sick leave, paid holidays, two months of paid parental leave and a physical fitness policy.

“We prioritize the Land Office employees first and foremost because they’re our greatest asset,” said Public Lands Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Garcia Richard. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What compels workers to join and stay with the State Land Office?

Our mission — because we manage those public resources on behalf of New Mexico’s public schools, universities and hospitals. Plus, land is part and parcel of our identity in New Mexico. Think public resources, public land — no matter who you ask across the political spectrum, they have a connection to land here and have had for generations.

One benefit offered at the agency is the ability to telework.

That is something that is unique to the Land Office: two days in office and three days work from home, for the most part. Sometimes that varies between the divisions depending on the workload, but in general, that is the model. What we saw is that during COVID, productivity didn’t really suffer from work-from-home policies, so we decided to just keep those in place after the pandemic waned a little bit.

How do you ensure that your staff aren’t just making ends meet, but actually living comfortably?

We have pretty systematically and methodically gone in and ensured that we are eliminating pay disparities, between gender pay disparities, between amount of experience and years of service we want. We want to recruit, certainly, but we want to retain our very quality employees, and so we do everything we can to do that. Now, are we perfect? No, there’s still a lot of work to be done around fair compensation for state employees. But I think the State Land Office stands head and shoulders above other agencies in trying to do everything we can to elevate these positions, both in terms of classification and pay.

What are some of the challenges the State Land Office has faced over the past year with that?

State work is challenging. I have never been a state employee myself, but I worked in public schools, and I draw a comparison there. There is a lot of criticism that state employees face, I think, unfairly. A lot of times, the burden of things that go wrong are placed on state employees’ shoulders. So it’s a hard place to be. And then we are limited. We’re not like a private company, where if someone is deserving of a raise, we can just grant them that raise. We have to work within the budget that we’re appropriated. So those are some of our challenges.