EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT, August 2021

For the past 17 months, much of the nation’s attention has focused on how to equip employees with the technology they need to work remotely and, at the same time, communicate with them without creating Zoom fatigue. This focus, however, has overlooked much of the work of government, which is performed by many who cannot operate remotely.

Compared to people at private sector companies, fewer public sector employees are office workers who can work from home. People who work in fields like public safety, firefighting, emergency services, public works, health care and public transit can’t phone or Zoom it in. In local government, these occupations can account for a majority of the workforce. These dedicated people have been risking their health and lives to continue to deliver services to the people government serves.

So, the coronavirus pandemic increased stress for all employees as they struggled to balance the demands of their remote or in-person jobs with their lives outside of work. This situation created what some have described as a worldwide mental health crisis.

It is no surprise, then, that research by the Institute for Public Sector Employee Engagement and others has shown that what happens at work affects how we feel about our lives in in general. Employees who are engaged at work are significantly more satisfied with their lives in general than are disengaged employees.

Perhaps that explains why the pandemic has caused people to reevaluate the work they want to do post-pandemic. A national survey done by Robert Half revealed that one-third of employees who responded during March and April of this year planned to look for a new job. Many said the pandemic has given them a new perspective on work, and 71 percent said they would leave an employer whose values don’t align with theirs.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data reinforce these survey results. Job vacancies in the United States are at an all-time high, and Americans quit their jobs in record numbers in May 2021. The number of retirements has also accelerated. Journalists have dubbed these trends “the great resignation.”

The public sector is not immune. The number of quits in government increased by 13 percent over the past year. As a local government HR director recently told me, “We’re losing good people—they can go anywhere they want right now.”

And then there is the looming retirement surge. In the 2021 version of the annual survey of HR leaders conducted by Mission Square Research Institute (formerly the Center for State and Local Government Excellence) in cooperation with IPMA-HR and the National Association of State Personnel Executives, 69 percent of respondents predicted that a wave of retirements will occur soon or in the next few years.

In this new world of work, building engagement is more important than ever to both recruit and retain talent. Public sector HR leaders recognize this. Seventy-seven percent of respondents to the Mission Square survey identified engagement as a key issue in their organization. Engagement’s cousin, employee morale, was identified as a key issue by 83 percent.

What Is Engagement, and Why Does It Matter?

Unfortunately, when some folks hear “employee engagement,” they think it’s just another touchy-feely scheme, or about planning social activities or making sure employees are happy all the time.

While we do want our employees to be happy at least most of the time, engagement is really about performance. It is about creating the environment and conditions for employees to feel good about their organization and how they contribute to accomplishing the mission of the organization.

Engaged employees believe their employer values them. In return, engaged employees will deliver what is known as “discretionary effort”—a research-y term that simply means they are willing to do whatever it takes to help the organization succeed.

The result is a win-win. The employee excels because they believe in what they and their organization are doing. Their commitment and performance then translate into superior organizational performance.

Decades of research have documented this business case for engagement, including in government. Organizations with highly engaged workforces achieve their strategic goals, operate more productively, deliver more responsive customer service and retain talent better. According to Gallup, high-engagement organizations have 43 percent lower turnover than do low-engagement organizations.

Institute for Public Sector Employee Engagement research has also shown that engaged employees in government are three times more likely than are disengaged employees to believe their organization is accomplishing its mission. This is critical for performance and retention because many public servants were attracted to government precisely because of mission.

We Can’t Manage What We Can’t Measure

I have a book in my library titled 180 Ways to Improve Engagement. It’s a good book with solid suggestions. But how is a reader supposed to figure out which of the suggestions will improve engagement in their organization? Work through them one at a time?

Good luck.

I recently spoke to the HR director of a city that has a longstanding employee engagement committee composed of employees from across the city, including representatives from labor organizations. I asked what the committee has done to improve engagement. The answer? The committee has organized social activities such as happy hours and picnics.

I’m sure these were nice activities. But as I wrote in Engaging Government Employees, “Free pizza and Coke on a Friday afternoon is not an engagement strategy.”

The most effective way to build engagement is to measure it and understand what influences engagement it in your organization. Ideally, this should be done by surveying employees to collect data on how they feel about their jobs and the organization, and then acting on the results to improve engagement.

While the Mission Square survey showed that 77 percent of HR professionals believe engagement is a key issue, only 33 percent of respondents indicated they are surveying their employees. I call this 44-percentage point difference the engagement data gap.

Employees want to be heard. At the Institute, we experienced this firsthand when we administered our national Employee Connection Survey to find out how public sector employees were handling the COVID-19 work environment. The survey generated almost 20,000 responses from government employees across the United States. Those public servants clearly wanted their organizations to know how they were coping with the workplace conditions created by the coronavirus.

Measuring engagement to create a baseline is critical. In our work with individual government organizations, Institute staff see wide variations across organizations in the level of engagement.

Even within organizations, engagement can vary by department. For example, a survey we recently conducted for a county revealed that the percentage of fully engaged employees ranged from a low of 14 in one department to a high of 76 in another department. Clearly, a one-size-fits-all solution to improving engagement won’t work for this jurisdiction.

The influences, or drivers, of engagement can also vary by organization and department. Engagement can be influenced by such factors as leadership, mission, the work itself, supervision, training and development, compensation, and diversity, equity and inclusion. In other words, and as with so many things in life, it depends.

This is why collecting data is so important. You can’t prescribe a solution without understanding the condition. To succeed in our new world of work, government organizations need to measure engagement and then act to build high-engagement, high-performing organizations.