Prodding Along
Written for Government Executive
Managers need to get employees juiced.
By Julie Sturgeon
Most Americans believe government employees work less hard and are less productive than private sector workers. But when Gregory B. Lewis and Sue A. Frank, who are professors and researchers at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, studied the motivation issue drilled into the datafrom the General Social Survey in 1989 and 1998,public servants were more likely than private-sector workers to say, “I make a point of doing the best work I can, even it if sometimes does interfere with the rest of my life,” Lewis and Frank wrote in their 2004 article in American Review of Public Administration.
The truth about civil servants’ motivation and productivity undoubtedly lies somewhere between the stereotype and the pledges of dedication. “When you talk about a workforce of 1.9 million civilian employees – not counting the military and postal service – spread among 80 federal departments and independent agencies, you’ll get a wide variability,” says John Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service in Washington. His group issued rated the best places to work in government partly to attract people to take jobs with Uncle Sam, but the research also gives Palguta and company fodder to preach the message that employees’ engagement(read: finding personal motivation and meaning at work) affects organizational success.
When comparing federal employees to private-sector workers, “there is probably less difference than you might expect, and that doesn’t bode well on either side,” says Marc Drizin, director of workforce engagement at Performance Assessment Network in Carmel, Indiana. His data divides U.S. workers into three categories:
Fully engaged
These people are with you because they want to be. They feel they have a good relationship with their bosses, work for ethical organizations, and are being trained for the long term. They have friends at the office and believe someone in the organization cares about them. These are the people a manager can most rely on to take care of the agency’s business and stakeholders. According to Robert Tobias, the director of the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University in Washington,., an engaged workforce increases productivity by 20 percent. So how do the engaged break out?
Private sector: 46 percent of employees
Federal government: 50 percent of employees
Only education, at 51 percent, scores higher .
“But that still means one out of two federal employees cannot be counted on to do the things that necessarily help their organization meet its mission, vision and values,” Drizin comments. “Better than lousy is just not where you want to be.”
Unengaged:
These folks are halfway out the door. They don’t like the organization, they are circulating their résumés and as a consequence are putting customer relationships at risk. They may be acquiring sensitive agency information to take with them out the door.
Private sector: 31 percent of employees
Federal government: 22 percent – the lowest by far of any industry
Reluctant: They’re reluctant to work hard, yet hesitate to leave for a range of reasons, including that their skills are too specialized to find similar work elsewhere, they hear unemployment is high in their field, or the agency chained them with golden handcuffs. “The government does the latter better than anybody else,” Drizin says. Currently, government employees enjoy tenure 2.5 times greater than the average employee, meaning a federal worker stays in a job for 10.4 years on average, while a private-sector worker stays just four.
“Most likely, you’ve not necessarily found fabulous human resource policies that would engender that difference,” Drizin says dryly. “The feds basically pay you to stay. Yes, they have retention but because people have to stay not because they want to. The difference in the verb makes all the difference in whether these employees will work harder, be a team player, go above the call of duty – those actions we want in any industry.”
Private sector: 23 percent
Federal government: 28 percent
The first two categories are no-brainers: Keep the engaged, kick out the unengaged. It’s that soft belly in the middle where federal managers flounder -- especially since the phrase “property rights for a job” has been upheld by the Supreme Court, so due process is required when separating federal employees from their positions, says Steve Nelson, director of policy and evaluation at the Merit Systems Protection Board. Replacing the unengaged is easier said than done.
So the next best solution is to motivate them.
High Expectations
Merit Systems Board Protection surveys show federal employees trust their first line supervisors most, but that confidence deteriorates as you move up the command chain. Even at closer range, employees can be wary, Nelson adds.
He blames the federal atmosphere for a chunk of that mistrust, pointing out that too many people moved into supervisory positions because they were the best at a given job. Not the ones with the most management potential. “We need a little a little more [emphasis] on the softer managerial skills: conflict resolution; setting reasonable, realistic performance expectations; clearly articulating the organizational goals; finding solutions to problems; adapting to changing circumstances,” Nelson says. In all, he has uncovered 60 important soft-side abilities; these are in the top 10.
In his book, the most vital managerial skill is understanding how to transmit performance expectations. It’s eight times more powerful than other strategies for engaging employees. Scratch a bit deeper and you find such understanding is based on communication. “That’s why a number of years ago many places went to written performance standards, thinking that would be the way to increase that communication,” Nelson says. However, written instructions aren’t the end all and be all.
“When I talk with employees from other agencies, it’s interesting how few of them use a performance feedback session as a tool for themselves,” says Chris Mihm, managing director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office, which researchers often cite as a model in the motivation field. “A lot of systems don’t give people permission to say, ‘Here’s what I need from you, boss.’ That is absurd. You have to have the two-way stuff.” What’s more, he says, it needs to be continual, not just during a formal feedback moment.
Palguta likes to get in a plug for what he calls mission matching-- assessing and selecting the best people that fit with a specific agency. “Clearly you can have wonderful leaders with all the great characteristics, but if you don’t have employees capable of doing the job, that isn’t going to work,” he says. “You can’t hook up the tiny dog to a sled and try to win the Iditarod.”
“Imagine back through your own career,” Mihm says. “The times that you have been the most motivated, the most energized about coming into work on a Monday morning have been those times when you had a sense that what you were working on was big, important and valuable. And it was probably some of the hardest work you did, some of the most stressful, but you were still juiced because it was something you clearly understood.”
Take, for example, the efforts of Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, to embrace lean manufacturing – business speak for consolidating work flow and cutting out financial wasteful processes. The goal is a short cycle time, a la Toyota’s famous production system. According to Darryl Perkinson, the supervisory training specialist and the national vice president of the Federal Managers Association, shipyard bosses took a tremendous step by asking the employees for their input on just how to rethink the new steps and processes. “That point of engagement somehow magnifies the result exponentially. Once employees see what they’ve done is worth something, it energizes them to think of more things to do,” Perkinson says. Over the past year, Norfolk Naval Shipyard has saved several million dollars, thanks to this exercise. Of course, Perkinson admits, because of the size of the facility, not everyone is on board. “But even if we’re making baby steps, it’s worth it to engage folks,” he maintains.
The Energy Department scored higher than average on the Office of Personnel Management’s 2004 Federal Human Capital Survey, particularly when it came to questions such as “how well are my talents used” and “how satisfied am I in the work I’m doing.” Deputy chief human capital officer, Claudia Cross, credits the fact that Energy makes its expectations clear from the top down. The secretary and the deputy hold weekly staff meetings-- sometimes twice a week – with their senior managers to go over very specific messages about their expectations. “Not just programatic issues, responding to Congress and those things, but ‘here’s how we treat people.’ ‘here’s what I expect a performance management to be all about in the department,’” Cross explains.
And that’s merely one piece. The other secret, she says, lies in giving employees at the junior levels the opportunity to influence big situations. After all, most employees gravitate toward federal positions because they’re motivated to serve – why not use that trait to the hilt? The formal mentoring program matching newcomers with veterans sees significant participation numbers, but DOE’s leadership program for younger, promising hires includes nterviews with the department’s executives, and a group project tackling a real issue, one that takes them out of their expertise and into new thinking and decision-making situations.
Empowering junior staffers certainly worked in Cross’s case. Her family tree doesn’t include a single federal worker. She was the first when she was hired as an intern at the Navy’s human resources division in 1975. In her second week on the job, she was allowed to talk to admirals about an important issue on the table. “I had a grown-up next to me, but I was at the table!” she says. “I had assumed I would shadow someone, but never that I’d be a point person. I started creating relationships right off the bat, and that’s pretty heavy stuff when you’re right out of college.
“I was hooked,” Cross adds. This year celebrates her 30 th year in government. Among the employees in the GS 9 levels that she has championed for DOE’s leadership program, none have failed. “And the stuff they come up as approaches or how to manage a group – it’s amazing,” she reports. For instance, one crew worked with general counsel to develop ways to work with private companies to help subsidize programs for diversity students who would not otherwise get any exposure to federal work. It’s currently in its fourth year and expanding to partner with other agencies as well.
“People stay because they have a good relationship with their employer. They don’t have a good relationship with their employer because they stay. There is no chicken and egg game here,” Drizin. says. “Government has to recognize the difference between engagement and retention,”
Drizen emphasizes that personal relationships between employees and supervisors are critical drivers of engagement. His research also supports the notion of good mission matching. But he emphasizes a third driver: ethics, diversity and safety. Drizin admits that sounds a “bit like the junk drawer in the kitchen because it holds everything,” but apparently employees are seriously concerned about it. Only six in 10 federal workers say they feel their organization is highly ethical, and that disturbs him. “There’s a bit of ‘what would Jesus do?’ when employees are faced with ethical dilemmas. Ethics is a top down, not a bottom up process, so if they think their leaders would put short-term concerns in front of long-termresults, they will, too,” Drizin warns.
Palguta advises managers seeking to motivate their employees not to shrink from making difficult demands. The Office of Management and Budget made his list of best places to work, even though it operates with just 500 employees and its visibility brings high expectations. “You can’t stay there unless you are really engaged in the work mentally and in terms of devoting time and effort,” he notes. “You produce or you need to find some other place to work. I don’t mean that in a threatening sense, it’s just the fact of life there. People love it.
“Fear of being fired isn’t a great motivator – that’s the way you keep people from straying of the reservation and chained to their desk. Real engagement comes from the fact that I have a real job, real responsibilities making good use of my skills and what I do is important to accomplish the mission,” he adds.
Revving Up Rewards
According to Rosslyn Kleeman -- who heads the Coalition for Effective Change,a non-partisan alliance of associations in Washington, D.C., that represents federal managers, executives, and professionals, and teaches a graduate class in workplace skills at George Washington University -- the more rewards, the better. And she’s not talking about more money. She says, for example, that she would be hard put to find someone who didn’t enjoy seeing his name in a weekly email or plastered in a publication at the office. .What’s more, a provision in federal law allows managers to give people time off for outstanding performance. “But it’s hardly ever used,” she notes.
Perhaps that’s because federal managers hold doubts about the motivating power of rewards. Only 30 percent of respondents to OPM’s 2002 Federal Human Capital Survey agreed with the statement “our organization’s awards program provides me with an incentive to do my best.” A depressing 45 percent flat-out disagreed. Drizin’s research isn’t any cheerier: Slightly more than half of federal employees said they believe they are treated with respect and appreciation. “So it’s not surprising that less than one in two feel fully engaged,” he says.
Yet Reginald Wells, chief human capital officer and deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration, has no intention of axing his rewards programs. Currently, his agency is expected to increase productivity by at least 2 percent per year — a goal it has exceeded consistently this decade. Meanwhile, SSA hosts a gala annually to honor the best and brightest in the field. The faces change each time.
“If they didn’t, it would probably start to be less effective,” Wells admits. “And I think the impact lies in it being a quality event. It’s not about offering flashy plaques but making them feel special, getting their photos taken with the commissioner.” During the Washington shindig, employees receive a Commissioner’s Honor Award for individual accomplishments, group accomplishments and length of service. Throughout the year, the headquarters and field components have employee recognition events. And managers and supervisors are encouraged to run with those spur-of-the-moment thank-you mementos as well.
For Palguta, a rewards program’s success doesn’t hinge on such details. Instead, it’s all in whether you recognize people who truly deserve the extra attention. Nor should recognition be confined to tangible rewards. “When I was a manager, I used to tell my supervisors that it wasn’t hard to find someone screwing up to jump on. My challenge was to catch people in the act of doing something good and give them a verbal pat on the back,” he says. Without the informal, the fancy awards ceremony won’t offer a good return on investment. “If I had to choose between the two, I’d take the daily positive communications,” Palguta adds.
Go FISH
Energy’s Cross chose exactly that when she championed the popular FISH! philosophy, a four-step program than hinges on having fun at the office. The program goes far deeper than merely playing, of course, or it wouldn’t have survived eight years in the private sector at $850 per training session. It walks participants through the details of what it considers important daily practices in the workplace: be there, play, make their day and choose your attitude.
Cross sees it as permission to keep koosh balls and chocolate at her desk. “I refuse not to have fun because it would just zap too much of my spirit away. To be creative, I think you have to be a little crazy, and having fun will give you those kind of pop ideas that don’t come into your head when you’re thinking linearly,” she explains. She even presented the FISH! video at a conference of fellow HR and training directors, some of whom also implemented it. Still, the federal government doesn’t have a reputation as a fun, playful atmosphere among potential employees.
Perkinson’s shipyard is working to erase that. He, too, believes private-sector motivation gimmicks have their place in the federal arena. When a team at Norfolk enjoys a success on a project – whether it’s on cost, schedule or effort – employees celebrate with a picnic. After a successful overhaul, they shoot off an old ship gun as a salute. “These activities work well and we do them a lot,” he says.
Count MSPB’s Nelson among the fun advocates, too, but only as long as managers keep the real goal in sight. “There has to be a feeling that what you’re doing matters,” he stresses.