by Allan Schweyer

“Research has clearly and consistently proved the direct link between employee engagement, customer satisfaction and revenue growth.”

~ Harvard Business Review, 2000

If there ever was a true debate around the linkage between employee engagement and organizational success, that debate has long since ceased. The correlation between employee engagement and every measure of organizational success is so well-established and so universally accepted that it requires no further attention here.

The focus in government agencies today must be on action: how to drive better employee engagement, rather than on whether employee engagement is worth measuring and encouraging. Once an organization believes that a more engaged workforce is a higherperforming one, the next logical step is to measuring current engagement levels  to set a benchmark, and then regularly (at least annually) re-measure engagement to chart progress.

Many agencies measure employee satisfaction but not engagement. Some may rely on the OPM’s annual Employee Viewpoint Survey for an indication of engagement levels. The Viewpoint survey is a good tool – about half the questions map well to employee engagement – but it is a general survey, not specific to the needs of any particular agency. Each agency should run its own survey and use the Viewpoint survey results (and other external surveys) for external benchmarking.

The challenge lies in getting the measurement right. Agencies must bear in mind that the tools they choose to assess engagement in year one will be the foundation upon which future data is set. If the data collected is not right or is missing important elements, it will have to be revised or even discarded. Doing so is potentially time consuming and expensive.

Choosing the right instruments is also important from a user perspective. Too many questions, for example, might lower participation rates while too few questions will limit the usefulness of the data. An employee engagement assessment must be balanced against the other surveys employees are asked to complete. An agency that uses an employee satisfaction survey for example, might consider discontinuing it once it begins assessing employee engagement.

For decades or longer, good managers have intuitively understood that employee engagement generates powerful returns. More recently, research results that quantify those returns have been available to leaders. Naturally, knowing that employee engagement is a strong determinant of organizational success, executives want to understand the level of engagement of their employees. As such, employee engagement surveys have mushroomed. Today there are literally thousands to choose from.

Many valid tools exist to measure employee engagement but the careful section of the right tool for a particular organization is often bypassed. All employee engagement instruments are not the same, nor should they all be administered and interpreted the same.  Careful selection will pay off for years to come.

Finally, agencies must start with the premise that they are going to analyze and then do something with the data an employee engagement assessment provides.  A surprising number of organizations invest in surveying employees and then do little to nothing afterward to drive engagement levels higher. Knowing resource limitations and objectives up front will also aid in the selection of the right engagement assessment tool.

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by Allan Schweyer

Have you ever been to Singapore? I’ve been quite a few times, it’s the jewel of Asia as far as I’m concerned. Sure, it’s a little boring compared to Thailand and a bit less exotic than Vietnam but it’s well run, the streets are spotless and  it’s citizens are the third wealthiest in the word (after Qatar and Luxembourg). Something is working in Singapore. It has been since Lee Kuan Yew founded it and broke it away from Malaysia in 1965. Since then this tiny peninsula with a few million people has grown from a dirt poor nation whose only resources were its people, to the first “Asian Tiger”.

Lee Kuan Yew believes in people and talent. Yew served as Prime Minister for more than thirty years and only fully retired from government last year at age 88. Under his leadership Singapore became adept at attracting top talent from all over the world. In this way it is similar to the United States, but Singapore doesn’t believe in talent only where the private sector is concerned. In Singapore, government agency heads are paid well over $1 million dollars (US) per year (even after they took drastic pay cuts in January this year). In 1994 Lee Kuan Yew, pegged the salaries of government ministers and top civil servants to the money they might earn at the top of the private sector. His reasoning was simple, he didn’t want the very best and brightest to not select government because of pay and he didn’t want them leaving because of pay. Yew’s policy remainslargely  in place and it’s been practical and effective. Like the United States, Singapore has one of the best run and least corrupt governments in the world.

Singapore’s experience is interesting in light of what’s going on here. U.S. federal government workers are paid well, but at the senior most levels, secretaries and undersecretaries of agencies, for example, the pay is far less than what some could (and have) earned in the private sector. Yet our highest paid professions – think Wall Street – attract “the best and the brightest” and that “talent” seems more incompetent these days than anyone. So if high pay correlates to bad and even stupid behavior, why should it work better in government?  Moreover, shouldn’t government attract people for reasons other than pay?  

It seems to me that the U.S is pretty close to having federal pay rates where they should be. They’re high enough to be competitive and even generous in many case right from entry level through the mid-SES range – especially when benefits such as job security are factored in.   There are a lot of good people in government and millions who would like to be (judging by the volume of applicants) and, on the whole, few people leave according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics attrition data. At the most senior ranks, many are political appointees who may have had stellar private sector careers where they earned much more, but were drawn to serve, and that’s a very good thing. Others who are career civil servants and have been promoted to the highest ranks might also earn much more in the private sector, but most choose to stay because they love the work they’re doing and the contributions they’re making. Besides, they know they’ll be generously rewarded on retirement (most before they’re sixty) with generous lifelong pensions and second careers in the private sector accompanied by six figure or even low seven figure salaries.

To be sure, pay cuts (the additional 5% contribution to pensions, for example) and fed-bashing by elected leaders is wrong and will do damage to the quality of the US Federal Government. Far better to address budget restraints through careful workforce planning where skills no longer needed can be eased out and in-demand skills nurtured and retained.  But Federal workforce compensation is not the problem if left alone. The problem is the disrespect being paid our civil service today which will surely erode engagement further and diminish the strength of the nation as a whole.

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by Allan Schweyer

I hold a fairly simple view of how we should address our broken economy. We’re in a big hole with the national debt and deficit, we should spend less, take our medicine and work hard to bring growth and prosperity back.

The problem is, I’m trained as an economist. This confuses my thinking and sometimes makes me doubt my own convictions. After all, the most famous and studied economist of all is Keynes. In basic terms, Keynes would counsel government to spend in recessionary times and to spend a lot in a deep recession. I’m also addicted to Paul Krugman’sNew York Times column. Krugman won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2008, he writes two or three times each week, always about our urgent need to drop austerity and ramp up deficit spending to fix our economy.

As I read a Krugman article I often feel myself starting to take his side. Mainly because I can’t easily articulate why the more difficult, austere and punishing path is the better one (is it just a holdover from my grandma who lived through the depression and lectured me about tough times)? Then, I marry my knowledge of talent and human capital management with economics and remember again why we have to take the hard road.

The reason is that we are broken. Our education system is average at best, our workers aren’t as competitive globally as they used to be, we live beyond our means and run up debt, we hate taxes but we’re addicted to government services, we’re overweight or obese, we don’t exercise and then we complain about high medical costs, and we fight wars we can’t afford.

My economic sense tells me that if we take the big spending Keynes/Krugman approach, we’ll get out of our economic doldrums in a jiffy. My talent/human capital sense tells me that we’ll have built a house on sand. We’ve been doing that for decades and then watching it get destroyed more thoroughly each time the wind blows.

Hard as it is, we have to take a stand now and refuse to pretend we’ve fixed a foundational problem by punting it a few years into the future. Does that mean we have to suffer permanently high unemployment? No, it means that if you’ve let your skills atrophy, you have to work for what the market will bear—and yes, that means taking away any government program that might discourage you from doing that. And if you have to work 60 hours a week because you’re only earning $7 an hour, so be it. Make sure your children get and maintain the right skills so that they’ll have a better life. The good news is your pay and quality of life will rise (albeit marginally) when we’ve fixed the mess we’re in.

I read a few years ago that the average French worker (who is far from the world’s most productive) is more productive than the average American worker on an hourly basis. In other words, yes, they hardly work, but when they do work, they’re better at it. How did it come to this? I hate to dump on the baby boomers, but they’ve enjoyed and overspent the dividends created by the mostly hard working, uncomplaining and productive generation before them, and now the only way back is the path of austerity.

We came right to the brink of destruction in this recession; the next time, that cliff will be a thousand feet above us as we descend into the valley of failed states and empires before us. That place is crowded, but can always find room for another.

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by Allan Schweyer

In addition to the two year pay freeze in place for federal public servants, some members of Congress are proposing that government employees contribute five percent more toward their retirement funds. In other words, federal employees would face a fairly significant pay cut on top of a pay freeze. These measures on top of general "fed bashing" are combining to sap the already low morale of the federal public service.

Public opinion concerning government and government employees is the lowest it's been in decades. Last year's media attention to pay disparities between the public and private sectors didn't help (yes, federal salaries are higher than average but so are the qualifications). This year's GSA and Secret Service scandals made matters worse. So in an environment where both Congress and the White House are looking for politically safe budget cuts, federal public servants are a very tempting target.

Under these attacks, one might expect to see large increases in employee attrition among federal civil servants. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, attrition has held at the relatively low rate of about five percent for several years. Clearly, the deep recession has made government workers reluctant to quit. An even greater disincentive for a large number of mid and late career civil servants are locked in pension plans. Those who leave stand to lose a great deal if they don't complete their minimum terms of service.

Both of these impediments to leaving are becoming less influential however. First, while unemployment is still high at 8.2 percent, the more difficult to fill positions in government, those with requirements for four year degrees and several years of experience, have low national unemployment rates (about 4.2 percent) and lower still in the greater DC Area (less than three percent). As the economy slowly improves, the war for skilled, educated and experienced talent can only intensify and the government, with its pay freezes, threats of pay cuts and overall morale problems, will have a very hard time competing. And just as this is happening, retirement of the fed's baby boomers is starting to accelerate according to a Partnership for Public Service study released in April this year. The golden handcuffs of defined pension plans are a thing of the past for young public servants who entered the federal service under far less generous pension plans. For them, quitting government means taking their 401k with them rather than sacrificing a generous retirement package.

Much of the American workforce is making sacrifices. Auto workers, for example, who lost jobs years ago when manufacturers moved jobs out of the country, are now taking back those jobs but at half pay as a condition of moving those jobs home. This isn't driven by corporate greed, it's simply adjusting U.S. pay rates to a global standard where the formula focuses on productivity and pays accordingly. Federal public servants should be paid against the same standards. The difference is that global pay for highly skilled knowledge workers is still high relative to most factory work. The fact that government work, especially inherently governmental work, cannot be offshored, means that the government has to compete for domestic skilled talent only.

With the economy rebounding and baby boomers in government retiring, a more strategic view should be taken. Targeting the federal workforce may be politically expedient but the harm done could be long lasting, with implications for all Americans.  

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