Thirty minutes later, I was out the door, temporary license in hand and surprised by the ease of it all.
DMV offices offer the public a rare glimpse of often tedious and convoluted government bureaucracy. And until recently, California offices embodied that governmental tedium. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom noted just how dissatisfied Californians were with their DMV experiences.
“I am not naive about the challenges at the DMV. The technology is byzantine,” Newsom said that year, announcing overhauls to the department and naming Steve Gordon as the DMV’s new director.
Since Gordon, a former technology entrepreneur, took over at the DMV, the department has moved more services online and taken other steps to increase the sprawling public-facing agency’s efficiency.
Those changes caught the attention of Stanford researchers who recently published a case study on Gordon’s leadership of the DMV as a means of teaching business school students and industry leaders how to cut through red tape.
When Stanford Professor Emeritus Robert Sutton went to his local DMV to transfer the title of his mother’s car after she passed away, he was shocked by how quickly he was in and out the door. The experience diverged sharply from Sutton’s previous DMV trips, prompting him to investigate what had changed.
Sutton, an organizational psychologist at Stanford Engineering who coauthored the case study, was interested in how Gordon has made changes based on frontline employees’ direct feedback. One example included in the case study detailed changes the department made to confusing questions about organ donation on drivers license applications after two DMV staff members pointed out how the questions often tripped up customers, causing delays.
“If you see that one of our processes is not working, say something,” Gordon said in an internal video shared with DMV employees. “Talk to your supervisor. Send me an email if you’d like. We can’t fix something if the right people don’t know that that thing is broken.”
The case study noted Gordon’s emphasis on moving services like renewing a license or registration online.
Earlier this year, Newsom touted in a press release that nearly 300 DMV kiosks across the state have helped Californians avoid trips to offices: Between 2019 and 2023, the number of online transactions grew by 44%.
Customer satisfaction survey results the DMV shared with the Stanford researchers found that between 2018 and 2024, satisfaction scores significantly increased, from 2.5 out of 5, to 4.25. The case study also noted the wait time to see a DMV representative without an appointment dropped from more than an hour and a half in 2018 to 13 minutes in 2021.
Sutton noted that his case study is dissimilar from articles and academic papers in that the subject — in this case Gordon — was given the opportunity to review them before publication. But he maintains that the business world can learn a lot about reducing red tape from the California DMV.
From a customer’s perspective, the red tape was minimal. The ease of my first DMV experience in California didn’t leave me dreading next year’s task of renewing my car’s registration.
Though on the topic of the licensing test for new California drivers, I have no comment.
©2024 The Sacramento Bee, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
