2022 Sterling Award Winners Honored

By: Dione Geiger, President

Three Organizations Honored with Governor’s Sterling and Georgia Oglethorpe Awards

~ The Sterling Council Honors Three Diverse Role Model Organizations~

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. –The Sterling Council today announced the Alachua County Tax Collector, Wellstar North Fulton Hospital (Roswell, Georgia) and Wellstar Windy Hill Hospital (Marietta, Georgia) as recipients of the prestigious Governor’s Sterling Award and Georgia Oglethorpe Award for 2022.  The Sterling Council has now recognized 92 organizations since 1992.

2022 Governor’s Sterling Award

The two-state award processes have recognized excellence for over 50 years, honoring organizations and businesses that have successfully achieved performance excellence within their management and operations. In 2018, the Florida Sterling Council partnered with the Georgia Oglethorpe Award to administer its processes.

Alachua County Tax Collector’s Office

The Tax Collector’s Office for Alachua County, located in Gainesville, Florida, has 81 full-time employees and 16 interns who provide services to citizens from three facilities within Alachua County.  Approximately $390 Million in taxes and fees are collected and distributed annually to 25 taxing authorities. The Tax Collector also provides services for motor vehicle titles and registrations; driver licenses, including road tests; concealed weapons licenses; and birth certificates.

The Tax Collector’s Office demonstrates excellent performance levels in customer service processes, process effectiveness and efficiency, customer satisfaction, workforce engagement, financial management, and governance. All work is performed in conjunction with an automated information management system, JARVIS, that enables the Tax Collector to facilitate efficient operations. JARVIS is a custom-designed data analytics tool to quantify all operational decision-making efforts.

Customer Satisfaction shows high sustained results of 98% from 2018 through 2021. This customer satisfaction rating has remained above the performance of benchmark peers for four consecutive years.  The transaction accuracy of 99.84% in 2021 also exceeds the best peer benchmark of 99.5%. Overall workforce satisfaction improved from 89.4% in 2018 to 89.6% in 2020 surpassing the peer group at 85% for all years reported. The annual external audit findings remained at zero from Fiscal Years 2017 through 2020, meeting the best peer benchmark of zero results and zero recommendations from the external auditors.

The Alachua County Collector’s Office is a first-time recipient of the Governor’s Sterling Award.

2022 Georgia Oglethorpe Award

The Georgia Oglethorpe award is given to organizations that are considered role models and demonstrate a systematic approach to performance for excellence. Out of 230 hospitals in Georgia, only two hospitals are receiving the award this year.

Wellstar North Fulton Hospital

Wellstar North Fulton is a non-profit hospital delivering an extensive array of both inpatient and outpatient services, as well as emergency services, including Level II Trauma and stroke capabilities.

The hospital’s employment of many systematic approaches and activities supported by Senior Leaders has allowed integration and communication at every level of the hospital’s hierarchy. These approaches include Visual Management Boards, Rounding, and process improvement tools such as A3 Catchball and PDSA. Processes, measures, and results are fully integrated and align with the hospital’s mission, vision, values, core competencies, and the four strategic pillars. Some of the most important strengths are high patient safety results against internal and national comparisons; favorable Stroke intervention results compared with trends against national comparisons; outpatient services engagement results show favorable and improvement trends against the 75th percentile; repeated high employee rankings in awards magazines such as the Great Places To Work top 100 benchmarks.

Wellstar North Fulton Hospital is a first-time recipient of the Georgia Oglethorpe Award.

Wellstar Windy Hill Hospital

Wellstar Windy Hill Hospital is a non-profit, Long Term Acute Care Hospital (LTACH) whose services include East Cobb Health Park located in Marietta, Georgia.

Leaders at the hospital have supported the creation of an environment for success, now and in the future, via the hospital’s mission. Dedicated to creating a culture that leverages the pursuit of excellence with both the patients they serve and through the employees’ work, they continue to integrate the hospital with new approaches to repeated success. Examples of high performance include exceptional performance, patient recommendations, and experience at 100%, compared to the 89.4% across the nation; high overall employee retention rates and exceeding national standards in all areas; senior leader communication exceeding or meeting many of the Great Places To Work Top 100 benchmarks.

WellStar Windy Hill Hospital is a first-time recipient of the Georgia Oglethorpe Award. 

About the Sterling Council, the Governor’s Sterling Award and the Georgia Oglethorpe Award:

Established in 1992, The Sterling Council is a public/private not-for-profit corporation supported by the Executive Office of the Governor. The Council oversees the Governor’s Sterling Award for Performance Excellence and administers the Georgia Oglethorpe Award.  The Awards are presented annually by the Governor to high-performing, role-model organizations, both private and public, that demonstrate superior management approaches and role model results.  The Awards are presented at the culmination of the annual Sterling Conference that teaches participants how to elevate performance and increase productivity.   Nearly 700 executives and professionals gather at this event for the first time since 2019 for a one-stop source for education, information, and inspiration. The conference concludes with recognizing best practices and the Team Showcase Champion. For more information, contact Dione Geiger at (850) 922-5316 or visit www.thesterlingcouncil.org.