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Measuring Employee Engagement
The first step for a government organization that commits to improving employee engagement is to understand the current level of engagement in the organization. There are a wide range of available approaches and tools that purport to help with this.
Employee engagement is a hot topic. This strong interest has created a sort of engagement cottage industry. A Google search on “employee engagement” produces more than 4.5 million hits, including a very authoritative-sounding Wikipedia entry. The Google searcher is also bombarded with engagement tools, reports, white papers, training sessions, lists, awards programs (including the “I Love Awards” organization’s 50 most engaged employers), seminars (learn how to “do” employee engagement for only $1,000), blogs, networks, and so on. One ad asks, “Is your company engaged?” No, but we’re dating.
It’s an employee-engagement jungle out there. One comment posted on an online discussion about the value of employee engagement referred to the “engagement racket.”
While I wouldn’t go that far, it is true that some of the advertised engagement solutions and measurement tools are unsupported by any apparent science and are often geared toward the private sector.
There is hope, however, for government agencies that are sifting through this blizzard of employee-engagement information. First, as we have discussed, there are approaches to measuring and building employee engagement in government that are based on strong scientific evidence. These include public-sector surveys developed by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the United Kingdom and Canadian governments. These scientific approaches also include other engagement surveys such as the Gallup survey, known as the “Q12,” which is based on 30 years of research involving more than 17 million employees.1 Gallup’s results have been reported in publications, including the Harvard Business Review and in books such as First, Break All the Rules and 12: The Elements of Great Managing. Gallup’s research has isolated 12 survey questions that predict employee engagement and therefore workgroup performance.2 The Gallup survey focuses on issues such as ensuring that employees understand their job expectations, receive regular feedback, and have the opportunity to perform well.
While Gallup has worked with government agencies, most of its Q12 data are from the private sector. Plus, you have to pay Gallup to conduct the Q12, but public-sector agencies that have contracted with Gallup for employee-engagement support report that Gallup delivers very solid value.
Consistent with my argument that government is different from the private sector, however, I believe it’s also reasonable that measuring engagement in the public sector should also reflect these differences.
Surveys of public-sector managers reveal that maintaining an effective and productive workforce is perhaps the most critical issue government jurisdictions and agencies face today. Yet it’s ironic that most agencies do not have formal processes, such as employee surveys or other research tools, to measure and then improve employee engagement.3
There are two basic ways to assess employee engagement—indirectly or directly.
The indirect approach involves trying to assess the level of engagement using data like employee turnover, employee performance evaluations, missed work time, accident rates, and the results of exit interviews. Some organizations are also even beginning to track their employees’ attitudes and views about their jobs and organizations by monitoring their social media activity on sites like Facebook. It’s not a big leap of faith to conclude that an agency with a lot of poor performers, high turnover, excessive employee sick time, or a high accident rate (or a lot of nasty comments on Facebook) may have some engagement issues. After all, we’ve already said that a high level of employee engagement is linked to lower turnover, less missed time, better performance, and so on. Case closed, right?
Well, not exactly, especially in government. Public-sector organizations are usually low-turnover organizations because of “golden handcuffs” that include generous benefits such as guaranteed retirement annuities and employer-paid health insurance, even in retirement. Therefore, turnover may not be a good indicator of employee engagement in government agencies.
However, even in a public-sector agency that has high turnover, this metric doesn’t necessarily relate to employee engagement. Sure, it could be that low employee engagement is driving high turnover. It could also be that an agency with high turnover is losing its employees to competitors who pay better, the agency has a poor selection process that results in bad job fits, or it has a lot of baby boomers who are retiring because it’s time for them to move on to the next stages of their lives. No harm, no foul. And so on.
Analyzing Turnover: Do You Know Who’s Leaving Your Agency?
Employee attrition in government is generally low. As a result, agency turnover data—when it’s available—can be easy to ignore. According to research conducted by the Partnership for Public Service, overlooking employee turnover and failing to understand exactly who is leaving, and why, is a mistake.4
On the plus side, attrition can create space for an agency to add new talent and skills, enable an agency to say farewell to marginal performers or disaffected employees, and provide promotional opportunities for less-senior employees.
On the minus side, the loss of experienced employees due to retirement or greener pastures can damage an agency’s capacity and performance if these employees leave with institutional knowledge and organizational savvy that up-and-coming staffers don’t yet have. The same goes for attrition of recently hired talent or employees with critical and/or hard-to-find skills.
High turnover can also indicate employee dissatisfaction with the agency; its leaders, managers, and supervisors; the workplace environment; or organizational systems and processes. For example, attrition of recently hired employees means wasting the considerable investment to recruit and hire them, as well as suggesting weaknesses in recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and supervision. According to some estimates, the cost of replacing a departed employee ranges from 30 to 50 percent of the annual salary of entry-level employees, 150 percent for midlevel employees, and up to 400 percent for specialized, high-level employees.5
Beyond replacement costs, agency leaders also need to clearly understand whether, and how, attrition affects operational capacity, the health of the workplace, and the agency’s ability to achieve its organizational mission. This includes analyzing turnover data to understand who is leaving and why. For example, while overall turnover might be low, what is the turnover rate for new hires; superior performers; and employees in mission-critical jobs, in specific demographic groups, and in individual work units? The “why” is also important and can be assessed through exit interviews as well as engagement-survey results.
Assessing employee engagement through the lens of performance appraisal data also has limits, particularly in government. It’s an unfortunate truth that the public sector is notorious for not providing employees with candid performance appraisals or, in some cases, not providing employees with appraisals at all. For example, in the federal government, performance appraisal systems do not effectively differentiate different levels of employee performance.6 Fewer than 1 percent of federal employees are rated as less than fully successful.7 While I’m an unabashed fan of public servants and the contributions they make, this absence of poor-performing federal employees defies logic in a workforce of two million plus.
Employee interviews and focus groups can also provide information on the level of employee engagement. An agency can, for example, conduct “engagement interviews” with employees to subjectively assess their level of engagement. Sometimes these discussions are also referred to as “stay interviews” (in contrast to exit interviews). While this approach can reveal how the individual employees interviewed feel, it is labor intensive and puts employees on the spot. Thus these interviews may not be candid. In addition, the results of these interviews, unless the interviewed employees are identified through statistically sound sampling techniques, can’t be generalized to the entire workforce.
The same goes for exit interviews to find out why employees have decided to leave and whether their departures suggest an employee-engagement problem. I think conducting exit interviews is a sound practice that organizations should use to collect data on why employees are leaving. However, exit interviews are the ultimate lagging indicator of workforce health (after all, these employees are already headed for the exits) and also suffer from the other limits of interviews: They are not anonymous and it can be difficult to generalize the data to the entire workforce.
Another, even more indirect strategy is a “diagnostic checklist”—a sort of self-assessment to assess engagement. According to its proponents, a “yes” answer to specific issues and concerns like the following can indicate an engagement problem:
• The credibility of leadership is routinely questioned: “We’ve heard this one before.”
• People often come to meetings and nod in agreement but limited or no progress is made.
• Employees are unclear about the priorities and expectations of leadership: “What’s the direction of the business? How does my role contribute?”
• There is a lack of information sharing across business units and a lack of collaboration toward common goals and results.
• Superior performance is often undefined, unrecognized, and/or unrewarded.
• Turnover among top performers is high while overall turnover remains flat.
• Rates of absenteeism and short-term disability are on the rise.
• Employees often arrive late and leave early.
• Training and development initiatives are poorly attended.
• Employees feel far removed from the results of the business and have little understanding of how they can contribute toward the organization’s strategy.
• There is a lack of a “higher cause” or “shared mission,” with people simply doing their eight hours so they can go home.8
These are issues that managers should reflect on. However, while this may lead an agency to conclude that there are workplace problems, these concerns won’t necessarily identify causes, including whether there are employee-engagement issues.
While some of these items do focus on data (turnover, absenteeism), most are subjective. For example, as discussed previously, the reasons for turnover might not link directly to employee engagement. The same goes for boring, unproductive meetings and low attendance at training sessions, which could result from poorly planned meetings and ineffective training programs.
Another approach, perhaps the most clever, is the “cheap climate survey.” This is billed as “something to try before launching into those expensive, time-consuming climate surveys.” Employees are asked to post happy or sad faces on a bulletin board to show how they feel about their jobs and the organization.9 While clever and undeniably low-cost, I’m not sure how confident I’d be about taking the “data” to senior management to advocate for an engagement initiative or anything else.
For these reasons, I believe that direct measurement, through employee surveys, is the most valid and reliable way to assess employee engagement, particularly in government, where other measures like turnover and performance evaluations are problematic. While surveying is a more complex solution than simply looking at already existing data or trying to brainstorm answers to diagnostic questions (or posting happy or sad faces), it’s a long-term strategy worth the time and effort to accurately measure engagement. In the words of Mila Cosgrove, the HR director of the city and borough of Juneau, Alaska, “you have to ask” your employees to truly assess their level of engagement.
As I suggested in my listing of the engagement “resources” available on the web, there is a wide variety of surveys—and firms that will conduct them—to measure employee engagement. Many of these firms are highly reputable and will not only help conduct the engagement survey but, just as important, be there to help analyze the results and then act on the data. The question is how to select the approach that is right—and affordable—for a government jurisdiction and agency.
Unfortunately for us in government, many engagement surveys and follow-up approaches are designed for employees in the for-profit world. For example, one company that offers engagement surveys advertises that organizations with the highest levels of engagement achieved the following results:
• 87 percent had increased revenue in the following three years.
• 86 percent reported increased market share.
• 90 percent of the publicly traded clients reported higher stock prices.
• 57 percent reported lower employee turnover.10
While this is impressive, except for turnover, these metrics don’t translate well to most government agencies. Plus, when it’s time to use the survey data to develop and implement a strategy to improve engagement, the world of government is far different from the world of business.
That’s why I suggest using a survey that’s been validated for use in the public sector. What does validated mean? It means the survey has been proven, through statistical techniques, to measure what it’s supposed to be measuring. Among other things, this usually means that the survey has been administered to a large sample of employees.
The Q12, for example, while not designed expressly for government, has been validated through millions of administrations to employees, some in the public sector. Gallup has been on the leading edge of the engagement movement, and its work is hugely valuable even though it does not focus primarily on government.
There are also engagement surveys that have been developed expressly for the public sector. For example, the 16 U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) engagement index questions I’ve cited are based on a survey of almost 37,000 federal government employees. This survey has been statistically validated and the responses generalize to the entire federal workforce.11 Although the results are based on surveys of federal government employees, the MSPB methodology can also be applied to other public-sector workplaces.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has also developed an engagement index based on the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey of federal employees. The survey includes 84 questions covering work experience, work unit, agency, supervisor/team leader, leadership, satisfaction, and work/life. Through statistical analysis, OPM identified 15 questions from the survey that it uses to construct an index that represents the “conditions likely to lead to employee engagement.”
The nonprofit Partnership for Public Service uses the OPM employee-engagement survey results to annually rate and rank more than 300 federal agencies in “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government.”12 Although employee satisfaction (what the Partnership measures) is not the same concept as employee engagement, research has shown that both satisfaction and engagement are linked to organizational performance.13
Similar in some ways to the OPM survey, the U.K. Civil Service People Survey is a comprehensive survey of U.K. government employees. The 2012 survey was completed by almost 300,000 British civil servants working in 97 central government organizations. The survey includes 49 “engagement driver” and 5 “engagement index statements” that respondents are asked to agree or disagree with:
1. I would recommend (name of department) as a great place to work.
2. I feel a strong personal attachment to (name of department).
3. (Name of department) motivates me to help achieve its objectives.
4. (Name of department) motivates me to help achieve its objectives.
5. I am proud when I tell others I am part of (name of department).14
In Canada, 12 of the 13 provincial and territorial governments collaborate, along with the federal government, on the Employee Engagement Interjurisdictional Initiative survey. The survey has 19 common questions, used by all participating jurisdictions, including 6 questions that compose an engagement index. The participating jurisdictions adhere to a usage and data-sharing protocol that outlines eligibility requirements for using the common questions and specifies the principles and operational procedures for collecting, storing, and reporting data and for the confidential sharing of results that enables benchmarking across the participating jurisdictions. The interjurisdictional team compiles the survey responses into a national index, which each participating organization can compare to its results. Employees are asked to rate the following six engagement index statements:
1. I am satisfied with my ministry/department.
2. Overall, I am satisfied in my work as a(n) (name of ministry/department) employee.
3. I am proud to tell people I work for the (name of ministry/department).
4. I would prefer to stay with the (name of ministry/department), even if offered a similar job elsewhere.
5. I am inspired to give my very best.
6. I would recommend (name of ministry/department) as a great place to work.15
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) conducts perhaps the largest single-employer engagement survey in the world, public or private sector. Every three months, the USPS invites one-quarter of its almost 550,000 employees to take the Voice of the Employee Survey. The survey has 33 statements including eight key statements that form the “performance index”:
1. I am aware of current business conditions facing the postal service.
2. I am confident in the ability of senior management to make the decisions necessary to ensure the future success of the postal service.
3. Rate the quality of the service provided by your office/facility to your customers.
3. Rate your immediate supervisor on communicating regularly to keep you informed.
4. The postal service values diversity of backgrounds, talents, and perspectives.
5. I feel personally responsible for helping the postal service succeed as a business.
6. I receive information to perform my job safely.
7. I understand how the work I do impacts the service the postal service provides.16
As these examples illustrate, there is a range of engagement surveys available. However, looking closely at them reveals that they share a few key dimensions. Although these engagement dimensions may be described differently in different surveys and analyses, they generally link to the six question areas in the MSPB survey:
1. Pride in the work or workplace
2. Satisfaction with leadership
3. Opportunity to perform well at work
4. Satisfaction with recognition received
5. Prospect for future personal and professional growth
6. Positive work environment with some focus on teamwork
A major advantage of the MSPB, OPM, and other public-sector-developed surveys is that they’re in the public domain and therefore can be administered without paying to use them. American taxpayers have already paid for the MSPB and OPM surveys.