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Step 5: Sustaining Higher Levels of Engagement
Improving employee engagement should make intuitive sense to managers, particularly in today’s government environment, where they face intense pressure to perform more efficiently and effectively.
However, maintaining and improving employee engagement requires a systematic approach and a long-term commitment. Taking action on employee-engagement survey results can produce some solutions that work and others that don’t. Creating permanent change requires assessing what worked and what didn’t by measuring, analyzing, and communicating the impacts of these actions. Specific areas of focus should include the following:
• Which solutions improved engagement with acceptable investments in time, money, effort, and other resources?
• Which actions cost too much for too little benefit?
• Which changes already in place will require continued support and/or resources?
• Did improved employee engagement drive improved organizational outcomes in a measurable way?
As I’ve emphasized throughout, it’s important to regularly communicate about progress and results to reinforce buy-in for future actions. Sustained improvement requires continued support not just from the top but from across the entire jurisdiction or agency. Generating this support and momentum means regularly reporting on results and communicating with key stakeholders about how the organization is responding, including specific actions to maintain areas of strength and improve areas of weakness. This includes internal stakeholders—agency executives, managers, supervisors, and rank-and-file employees—as well as union and employee-association leaders. In government, this can include external stakeholders such as legislators and even the citizens government serves. This approach should be incorporated into the communications strategy.
One important way to maintain engagement momentum is by spotlighting successes. This means recognizing units and employees who have been instrumental in improving the workplace environment (e.g., the Federal Aviation Administration’s annual “Making the Difference” award). Recognition can inspire others to act. That’s the rationale behind the University of Wisconsin Hospital’s “Best-in-Class Library of Action Steps,” which publicizes the good ideas implemented by hospital units in response to employee-engagement survey results.
Immediate results can be immediately satisfying. But, in the long run, maintaining or improving employee engagement requires a culture of improvement. Employees across the organization and at all levels (especially agency leaders/managers and in the HR department) must model sound employee-engagement practices. This can be tough in government, particularly in agencies that come under public criticism and/or where leaders and budgets can change from year to year. However, if commitment to improvement becomes part of the agency’s DNA, improved engagement can endure.
Managers and supervisors are critical to moving the needle of engagement. In other words, it’s about leadership. This means that leaders should be held accountable for maintaining and improving engagement. Oregon Metro did this by explicitly incorporating improved employee engagement into the organization’s vision and strategic plan and then developing a set of competencies based on employee-engagement survey results (i.e., by answering the question, What makes Metro a great place to work?).
In the Canadian province of Alberta, the engagement strategy really took hold when two actions were taken:
1. An engagement index was created that summarized survey results in a way that was far more understandable, transparent, and comparable across units than reporting only the results of individual questions.
2. Employee engagement was included in the performance standards/contracts of the deputy ministers in each department. This focused leaders’ attention on engagement issues.
But sometimes it just takes patience and persistence. Gary Johnson, director of HR at the University of Wisconsin Hospital, says he is now peppered with questions from senior-level colleagues and key operational directors about how to improve engagement. They all want to talk about it, including at Gary’s 6:00 a.m. spinning class. When the hospital first started on the road to improved engagement, however, the questions were at times negative, focused on why the hospital decided to take this on and whether it was truly needed. Despite this pressure, the hospital persisted, and a culture of engagement has emerged.
Consider again the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which initiated a multiyear culture-change program focusing on engagement that started in 2008 and continues. This program helped FDIC ascend to the number one spot among large agencies in both the 2011 and 2012 “Best Places to Work” rankings.
How Oregon Metro Sustains Employee Engagement
Oregon Metro, the regional government for the greater Portland area, has been conducting employee-engagement surveys since 2008. In addition to reviewing and acting on specific survey results, Metro has worked hard to incorporate engagement into the agency’s strategy and culture. To do this, Metro took the following steps:
• Directly reference engagement in the Metro statement of purpose: “We inspire, engage, teach, and invite people to preserve and enhance the quality of life and the environment for current and future generations.”
• Include engagement as a component of one of Metro’s key values (teamwork): “We engage others in ways that foster respect and trust. Teamwork forms the essence of our work environment. Through collaboration and commitment to common goals, we achieve greater outcomes. We value positive relationships and nurture them with cooperation and honest communication. Individually, we contribute to the greater whole by being dependable and accountable for our actions.”
• Identify engagement as a key aspect of the HR department’s vision and strategy, as follows:
• Vision: Create a great workplace with diverse, engaged, productive, and well-trained employees.
• Strategic goal: Increase the level of employee engagement in order to maintain a productive workforce to meet the agency mission.
• Include employee engagement as a key management competency—“People—engage and develop”—and then linked this competency to training and manager accountability. This competency is further defined as follows:
• Create an environment of trust and respect; model and reinforce Metro values.
• Manage individual and team performance.
• Clarify expectations and provide timely feedback.
• Recognize the contributions of others.
• Address performance issues and resolve conflict.
• Develop self and others.
• Create development plans with employees.
• Delegate to help employees expand their skills.1
MAKE MANAGERS ACCOUNTABLE FOR ENGAGEMENT
Leadership is a key to improving and maintaining engagement because leaders have influence over the conditions that drive engagement. Accountability can help convert an engagement “project” into a way of doing business, day in and day out. Accountability can be achieved by incorporating engagement into the agency vision and strategy (as Oregon Metro does), including it in managers’ contract standards or performance expectations (as Alberta does), or widely and publicly disseminating the results of satisfaction/engagement surveys (as the Partnership for Public Service does for the “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” rankings).
In the federal government, the Office of Management and Budget, a powerful central agency that drafts the federal budget, announced that it would consider agency “Best Places to Work” scores and rankings in deciding on agencies’ funding.2 Not surprisingly, this focused the attention of many agencies on the rankings (even though more than a few also complained that employee satisfaction scores shouldn’t be incorporated into budget decisions).
At the University of Wisconsin Hospital, managers’ performance bonuses now depend, in part, on hospital-wide engagement scores. According to hospital HR staff, this has helped maintain the long-term focus on engagement. In my organization, we made senior managers accountable, as part of their annual performance expectations, for analyzing and responding to their units’ engagement issues, as identified in the survey.
MEASURE RESULTS
A substantial stream of research has demonstrated that higher levels of employee engagement result in better organizational performance. While much of this research has been in the private sector and focuses on financial outcomes such as revenue and profit, there is also solid and growing evidence about public-sector outcomes.
Government organizations, jurisdictions, and agencies that take action to improve engagement also need to put in place a process to measure the impacts of a more highly engaged workforce, including linking improved engagement to important agency outcomes. Despite the compelling private-sector results linking engagement with organizational outcomes, public-sector organizations committed to improving employee engagement need to make this commitment to measuring their own results.
Demonstrating outcomes is a key to sustaining engagement momentum and high levels of engagement. Whether it is better employee retention, improved quality or timeliness, faster response times, fewer on-the-job accidents, a higher level of customer service, improved performance as measured by employee performance evaluations, or success achieving the agency’s strategic goals, metrics enable the organization to link improved engagement to agency outcomes. While this can be particularly challenging for government programs that don’t have readily measurable goals, connecting the dots between engagement and performance is important and possible.
Results at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) show how improved employee satisfaction/engagement can drive key agency outcomes. The PTO issues patents and registers trademarks. In 2007, the PTO ranked 172 out of 222 federal government subcomponents in “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government.” After steady progress in 2009 and 2010, PTO moved into fifth place in 2012. This improvement occurred when agency leaders made workforce improvement a priority. Changes included reengineering the patent-examination system by (1) revising the milestones for reviewing patent applications, (2) giving patent examiners more flexibility, and (3) allowing them to have more direct contact with applicants. PTO management did not impose these changes unilaterally or confrontationally. Instead, management collaborated with employees, union representatives, and other stakeholders to understand their concerns and find common ground.
According to a PTO executive, this process created “a sense of teamwork between managers and employees” and “helped employees feel empowered.” As a result, examiners now have “more time to do their examinations correctly” while being more productive and feeling “more in control of their work.”
The PTO also implemented employee and manager award programs and gave employees the opportunity to provide feedback to management on workplace issues. In addition, it is among the federal agency leaders in percentage of employees who telecommute.
The results are measurable. At the end of fiscal year 2011, the PTO backlog of unexamined patent applications was reduced to 669,625—the lowest total in five years. While still a huge caseload, this was a 10 percent decrease in the backlog from fiscal 2009, even with an average 5 percent annual increase in patent application filings. The PTO’s trademarks operation also met or exceeded all fiscal 2011 goals for quality, timeliness, and expanding online service through e-government. PTO officials attribute these measurable improvements in large part to improving workplace conditions.3
READMINISTER THE SURVEY
Sustaining improved engagement also means continuing to regularly measure it through surveys. The initial engagement survey establishes the baseline, and subsequent surveys enable the agency to compare improvements against this baseline. This is the only sure way to really know if employees are engaged. Surveying also makes the entire organization—including leaders, managers, supervisors, and rank-and-file employees—accountable for employee engagement. Agencies that conduct engagement surveys typically do them annually or biennially. Surveying less frequently can put a brake on momentum to improve engagement. That’s why the province of Alberta has surveyed its employees every year but one since 1996. Measuring and then improving employee engagement requires this kind of a long-term commitment.