______________
How Managers Can Respond to the Differences Between the Public and Private Sectors and Improve Engagement
The differences described in Chapter 4 have important implications for employee engagement and how to achieve and maintain it. First, and critically important, government agencies have an extreme dependence on their human capital—their talent—and this means that public-sector managers must make engagement a top priority, even more than their private-sector counterparts.
This is particularly true in today’s environment of budget cuts, downsizing, attacks on public-sector benefits, very limited pay raises (or even pay cuts), and the general demand for government to do more with less. Because government managers have fewer tools to deal with these challenges, employee engagement should be front and center. And this is true across the globe, not just in the United States. The British report “Leading Culture Change: Employee Engagement and Public Service Transformation” concludes,
In one sense, the challenge facing all local service organisations is essentially the same: to do “more with less.” The latest and most urgent version of the challenge was set by the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review in October 2010, which cut £83 billion from public spending over the next four years and required local authorities to reduce current spending by 27 percent.1
To fully leverage the power of engagement to help address these challenges, government agencies and managers must approach engagement—and efforts to improve it—differently than private-sector employers and managers.
For example, let’s take a more detailed look at the 2012 survey by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, which revealed that the top issues facing state and local governments are as follows, in order. (Note that 65 percent or more of respondents rated these as “important”):
• The public perception of government workers
• Retaining staff needed for core services
• Managing workloads when current staff is stretched thin but new staff cannot be hired
• Reducing employee health care costs
• Staff development
• Employee morale2
All but one of these issues, health care costs, are clearly linked to employee engagement. And even that issue can affect engagement if employees continue to be asked to shoulder a higher proportion of health care costs. At the University of Wisconsin, some of our lowest-paid employees gave up their health care coverage because they couldn’t afford it after employee contributions were increased.
Compare the center’s results to a survey of the top business challenges private-sector firms say they face: sustained and steady top-line growth, excellence in execution, and consistent execution of strategy by top management.3 These are important challenges, to be sure, but they are different from the challenges faced by government and have different solutions. For the public sector, the top issues line up around talent and employee engagement. Small wonder, then, that in the 2012 online survey referenced earlier, conducted by ADP and the International Public Management Association for HR, nearly all survey respondents (all of whom work in state and local government) reported that employee morale and engagement have sharply declined in the last few years.
But I believe that low engagement in government is not just a badnews story. The good news is that there is tremendous potential to improve government performance by improving employee engagement. To achieve this potential, however, government managers must act aggressively to improve engagement. They must also understand the differences between the public and private sectors, what these differences mean for engagement (as outlined in the previous chapter), and how to respond to them.
The following sections describe how public-sector managers who want to improve employee engagement can address these challenges. As you read this, however, you may recall that I said earlier that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to improving engagement. I believe that each organization, jurisdiction, and agency needs to measure and then analyze its own level of engagement, identify specific areas to improve, and then act on the data.
That process notwithstanding, however, there are also some broad principles that apply generally to employee engagement. For example, the engagement questions in the surveys developed by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board and others can serve as veritable management checklists and provide a framework to help meet the challenges that public-sector managers, in particular, face as they attempt to improve employee engagement. Many of the engagement research studies (and the surveys that often accompany them) have identified engagement “drivers.” These are factors that lead to high levels of engagement. These drivers are often described differently, and therefore sorting through them can be confusing. But most of them focus on similar factors.
For example, the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board survey includes questions that fall into six areas that drive employee engagement:
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 teamwork4
Generally speaking, if these conditions exist in an agency, that organization should have a high level of employee engagement.
OVERCOMING THE IMPACTS OF ATTACKS ON GOVERNMENT
Persistent attacks on the public sector and public-sector employees create serious problems for government managers who are trying to improve the engagement of their workforces. Because “pride in the work or workplace” is an important driver of engagement, public-sector managers have to find ways to overcome the demoralizing impacts of government bashing.
Government agencies and their leaders need to aggressively and publicly advocate for government and the public service, including to elected and appointed officials and in the media. This includes identifying and publicizing—both to employees and to external audiences—agency successes and the resulting benefits to the public. This also means directly confronting critics to explain and emphasize the value of government and public service. Rank-and-file employees need to be involved in this process to put a face on government and counteract the “nameless, faceless bureaucrat” stereotype.
In other words, government agencies need to get into the public-relations business to educate the public about what government does and what it accomplishes—in press releases, in public forums, on websites, in the social media, and even in our schools. Too often, government does not do this well, or at all.
That’s unfortunate, because government agencies should have a lot to say. In its 2007 annual report, the Partnership for Public Service included a “Government’s Everyday Impact Index” to illustrate the role of the federal government in the day-to-day lives of Americans. The index included data (mostly from 2006 to 2007) such as the following:
• Number of people who travel on federally funded highways each day: 190,000,000
• Number of people who visit a national park each day: 750,000
• Number of students who received federal student aid for college: 10,000,000
• Number of people who received Social Security benefits: 49,122,831
• Number of people who received health care through Medicare: 44,067,816
• Percentage of children receiving free or reduced-cost school lunches funded by the federal government: 56
• Number of families who received federal assistance to heat or cool their homes: 5,800,000
• Number of criminals successfully prosecuted by U.S. attorneys: 72,585
• Number of businesses counseled by the Small Business Administration (SBA): 1,520,000
• Number of U.S. businesses operating with the assistance of an SBA loan: 190,000
• Number of workplace safety regulations prosecuted by federal officials: 88,846
• Average number of patents granted each day: 476
• Phone numbers on the Federal Trade Commission’s “Do Not Call” list: 145,000,000
• Number of patients treated at Veterans Affairs medical facilities: 4,200,000
• Number of people in foreign countries who received U.S. disaster relief: 173,000,000
• Number of passports issued annually by the State Department: 12,000,0005
These examples, while providing compelling evidence of the impact of the federal government, only tell part of the story. The public also needs to understand the many ways that state and local governments affect them every day—work that includes maintaining our parks and roads, providing police and fire protection, educating our kids, delivering social services, maintaining water and sewer systems, licensing professionals who work in fields such as health care and law, passing zoning laws to make sure our neighborhoods are attractive and livable, and collecting trash. Most Americans take these services for granted. According to Dick Armey, the former House of Representatives majority leader, “I don’t want to give the impression that most government programs are designed, even ostensibly, to help families with the needs of everyday life. Most government programs don’t even pretend to do that, and very few American families would notice their disappearance.”6
His remark is as outrageous as it is untrue.
In addition to damaging morale and employee engagement, attacks on government have limited the public sector’s ability to attract talent. The public sector needs to aggressively recruit new talent by marketing what government does, the value of public service, and the opportunities to make a difference by working in government, including early in the careers of new hires.
SUSTAINING ENGAGEMENT DESPITE FREQUENT LEADERSHIP CHANGES
The revolving door of top leadership in government, accompanied by shifting policy priorities, makes employee engagement in government more important—but more difficult—to maintain and improve. Temporary political leadership can short circuit engagement initiatives. So the pressure is on career managers and supervisors to make the case for employee engagement, up and down the organization, as a long-term strategy.
Leaders with short-term agendas that dramatically change agency priorities and policies can (perhaps unintentionally) block fundamental engagement drivers such as employee pride, satisfaction with leadership, input to decisions, and the feeling that employees have the opportunity and tools to perform well at work.
To overcome these barriers, career managers and supervisors, in particular, must provide strong and stable leadership, managing not just down but also up. They must also be politically astute.
Specific strategies include onboarding new political leaders to help them understand—and buy into—the agency’s values, mission, and goals (not just their political agendas). Newly appointed political leaders need to understand how to translate and link their political goals to their agency’s mission, goals, and operational activities. Career public servants can help political leaders understand how to make this happen. This also means establishing positive relationships, right from the start, with these elected/appointed leaders, including helping them understand that good policies and laws do not automatically translate into good outcomes. Results depend on engaging the public servants who must implement these policies and laws.
The National Academy of Public Administration and the IBM Center for the Business of Government collaborated on Speeding Up the Learning Curve: Observations from a Survey of Seasoned Political Appointees. This study summarized the results of a survey of a group of Senate-confirmed appointees of former President George W. Bush. According to these appointees, their success depended heavily on building positive relationships with career employees and understanding the agency’s internal culture.7
Metro, the regional government for the Portland, Oregon, area, conducts employee-engagement surveys every two years. Metro’s current chief operating officer (COO) was appointed in 2011. According to Mary Rowe, the Metro HR director, the new COO quickly bought into Metro’s employee-engagement strategy because she was presented with a strong business case for continuing the initiative.
In the 2009 “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government,” the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) received the lowest score that an agency had ever received: 16 on a scale of 0 to 100. (For comparison, the lowest score of any agency or agency subcomponent in 2012 was 32.7.) I was managing “Best Places” when we calculated that FLRA score. We were so surprised by the low score that I called the HR director to ask him if there was any way we had miscalculated the score. His response went something like, “Nope, you got it right. We were expecting a low score.”
One year later, the FLRA score skyrocketed to 68.3, and in 2012, it was 74.3. The authority took a series of aggressive actions that drove these improvements. These steps included the authority chairwoman bringing senior career and political leaders together in regular meetings to share information and discuss mission performance, what policies to develop, and how to implement them. These meetings helped create a more collegial environment among political and career leaders and also improved communication.
The province of Alberta, Canada, has been conducting employee-engagement surveys regularly since 1996. During this time, the province has had had three different elected premiers, the province’s head of government. These changes in political leadership have not diminished Alberta’s commitment to engagement, largely because the deputy ministers in each department, who are career (i.e., not elected or appointed) executives, have continued to support the survey strategy.
Career managers and supervisors must also work hard to foster direct and positive interactions between political leaders and rank-and-file employees to help them understand each other’s interests and agendas. This includes being the liaison between elected/appointed officials and frontline employees—for example, avoiding the disastrous initial interaction New Hampshire governor Craig Benson had with his career employees. Compare what the governor said on his first day (“Not many people in this room have been asked to bring their brains with them to work”) to what President George H. W. Bush told 200 federal career senior executives when he gathered them at Constitution Hall shortly after he was inaugurated in 1989:
Well, I’m honored to be with you, to work with you, you here in Washington, your colleagues in the federal service around the nation. They’re some of the most unsung heroes in America. The United States is the greatest nation in the world because we fulfill that mission of greatness one person at a time, as individuals dedicated to serving our country. And as we embark on this great new chapter in our nation’s history, I want to tell you—came over here to tell you—that I am proud of you and very glad that we will be working to write this chapter together. Thank you all, and God bless you in your important work. Thank you very, very much.8
Many of the career executives who were there still talk about how inspiring it was to see and hear the new president speak to them, very personally, about the value of public service.
To further overcome the negative impacts of frequent leadership changes on engagement, career managers and supervisors must also insulate rank-and-file employees, as much as possible, from political maneuvering.
Managers should also advocate to senior leadership on behalf of employees. This includes making a commitment to, and supporting, long-term employee development by providing the time and money for training and other development activities.
OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGE OF HARD-TO-MEASURE AGENCY GOALS
Highly engaged employees have a clear “line of sight” between their jobs and the mission, goals, and impacts of their organizations. However, it’s often difficult for public-sector organizations to clearly define goals and measure their impacts. That makes it more difficult to have this line of sight and also puts government managers in a double bind. That is, the public-service motivation research has shown that line of sight is particularly important for public servants, yet it is harder to connect these dots in government because of goal ambiguity.
Government managers must respond by clearly articulating the long-term mission, values, goals, and impacts of the agency (i.e., in contrast to short-term political goals). Then managers must work with employees to make sure they see the connections between their work and these goals—and the agency’s impact on the public it serves. A key way to do this is to connect employees directly with the citizens they serve. Here’s the way one public servant put it: “When I found myself getting down, I would head to the front lines. Being among the citizens we served reminded me why I was there and why it was important to keep fighting.”9
INVOLVING EMPLOYEES IN DECISION MAKING AND SURVIVING THE INFLUENCE OF EXTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS
An important element of employee engagement is input to decision making (i.e., “my opinion counts”). That’s why the complicated, inefficient, and sometimes even irrational government decision-making environment is a barrier to managers who are trying to improve and maintain high levels of engagement. More than their private-sector peers, government managers who want to maintain and improve engagement in the complex environment of government must work hard to involve rank-and-file employees in operational decisions in the areas they can influence. To achieve this end, public-sector managers and supervisors should do the following:
• Involve employees in making operational (implementation) decisions about how to implement policies and improve work processes.
• Explain the context for political decisions even when they seem illogical, and then translate these decisions into operational steps. Employees need to understand the basis for, and nature of, political decision making—that is, understand the “why” of these decisions as well as fully appreciate the realities of the how government is designed and operates. Elected officials (and their appointees) pledge to implement certain policies, and the job of career employees is to help implement these policies.
• On the other hand, also try to make sure senior leaders understand frontline employee views and perspectives.
• Create an environment that encourages employees to take risks and then insulate them from negative consequences.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was number one on the “Best Places to Work” rankings for large federal agencies in 2011 and again in 2012. One reason for the high score was a dedication to soliciting staff input and communicating how and why decisions have been made. Even if employees don’t agree with decisions, explaining them can go a long way toward maintaining and improving engagement.
ENGAGING AN OLDER, MORE EDUCATED, AND MORE WHITE-COLLAR WORKFORCE
Government managers can leverage the unique demographics of the public-sector workforce to improve engagement, but these demographics also present challenges. Since, in general, government workforces are more white collar than private-sector workforces, public-sector managers can build on this natural engagement advantage. The flip side of this is that more educated and professional workers have high expectations about making a difference and being involved in decision making.
Managers striving to improve engagement can leverage the upside and minimize the downside of government workforce demographics in the following ways:
• Make the engagement business case, to managers and supervisors in particular, to demonstrate that engagement should be a way of life in the workplace—that is, not a fad but a proven strategy that can help leaders, managers, and supervisors achieve their goals and therefore succeed. In the words of a manager in the Air Force Materiel Command, make engagement a mind-set, not just a buzzword.
• Hold managers/supervisors accountable for improving engagement and achieving measurable results (that an engaged workforce can help them deliver).
• Understand that different generations have different needs and perspectives (e.g., for work/life balance and input to decisions) and then create workplace conditions that meet these needs as much as possible.
• Train managers on how to deal with—and leverage the talents of—multiple generations in the workforce.
• Openly discuss retirement and help older employees ease gracefully into the next phase of life. Several years ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) asked employees approaching retirement age (and there were many) what their retirement plans were. TVA was concerned that employees would be reluctant to answer this question for fear that the authority would use the answers to somehow discriminate against older workers. However, TVA employees responded very positively, including many who said, “What took you so long to ask?” TVA used the data to develop a succession-planning program.
• Implement a succession-planning process that conforms to civil-service restrictions against preselection. This can be accomplished by implementing succession planning as a career-development program open to all eligible employees.
• At the other end of the employee life cycle, prepare to recruit replacements for the baby boomers who are beginning to leave government. This means putting in place effective recruiting and hiring systems to attract talented people who are already motivated to consider public service.
Part of the solution is also to provide younger employees with opportunities to make a difference and excel. For example, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB; which has done consistently well in “Best Places to Work”) has a much younger workforce than most public-sector organizations—one-third of its employees are under the age of 35. OMB attracts this talent because it has built a reputation as a place where talented young people can make their mark. OMB gives young staff members responsibility for critical agency assignments, even at the beginning stages of their careers. And it doesn’t hurt the agency brand to be located in the executive office of the president of the United States.
OVERCOMING CIVIL-SERVICE RULES AND FINANCIAL LIMITATIONS AND USING OTHER APPROACHES TO INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR
Public-sector managers do not have many of the financial tools that most private-sector managers have to link rewards to performance and therefore drive behavior and performance. Plus, government personnel systems are famously (or infamously) inflexible (“you can’t hire or fire anyone in government”).
Faced with limited ways to reward and recognize their employees, managers in government need to emphasize agency mission and impact and also provide nonfinancial recognition. Money is not the only way to recognize superior performance. Sometimes simply thanking an employee for a job well done can go a long way.
In fact, the good news is that nonfinancial rewards can be an effective way to reward and engage public-sector employees. A recent survey of federal government employees revealed that federal employees are not motivated solely, or even primarily, by monetary rewards. The survey respondents rated eight nonmonetary reward options as more important than monetary awards and bonuses. The higher-ranked recognition approaches included “personal satisfaction,” “interesting work,” “job security,” and “being able to serve the public.”10
Here are some other approaches government managers should consider to overcome rigid personnel rules and limited financial tools and improve engagement:
• Adopt workplace flexibility practices, such as allowing employees to work remotely and adopt alternative work schedules (e.g., four 10-hour days).
• Involve employees in decision making.
• Use the new hire probationary period to weed out bad fits. Too often, marginal performers in government are “passed” through probation and then become far more difficult to deal with and/or remove.
• Clearly articulate employee performance expectations and recognize good performance, but also use the performance management process to deal with employees who do not perform and/or resist change. Although dealing with performance problems can be difficult in government, it is possible to fire a poor performer.
• Push human resources to do its part in dealing with performance problems, including making sure that managers understand HR policies and processes and receive the support they need to deal with poor performers.
• Advocate for broad personnel/civil-service reforms to create more flexibility (e.g., in hiring, job movement, and dealing with poor performers).
INVOLVING LABOR UNIONS
Public-sector managers must also involve labor organizations as partners—and therefore as advocates—in measuring and improving engagement. This means reaching out aggressively to unions, making the business case for engagement, and then involving labor in measuring engagement and taking action to improve it. It also means making it clear to labor organizations that employee-engagement initiatives are not a strategy or conspiracy to co-opt employees and wring more work out of them or to cut pay and benefits.
Employee engagement, if done carefully and collaboratively, offers the potential to break through labor-management antagonism and partner with organized labor to improve working conditions, but this relationship must be approached with care and sensitivity. In particular, it is important to deal with labor-union leaders and only deal directly with the rank-and-file as a last resort.
The city of Minneapolis, which has conducted employee-engagement surveys four times since 2004, has 23 separate collective-bargaining agreements and a workforce that is more than 90 percent unionized. Before conducting employee-engagement surveys, HR staff met with a board of union representatives to discuss the survey strategy and timeline and ask for their support in increasing the overall response rate. After the survey results were received, HR staff again met with the unions to review the results, including areas of strength and opportunities for improvement.
Similarly, the Air Force Materiel Command reviewed its engagement survey with labor unions and explained the command’s plans for collecting the survey data and using the results. This process paved the way for working with the unions in later implementation strategies. The Oregon Metro Board has also worked closely with its unions and shares engagement survey results with all employees and labor organizations.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) consistently ranks near the top in the “Best Places to Work” rankings despite having to deal with GAO’s first-ever employee union. This relationship is unusual for a federal agency because the new union was granted the right to negotiate with GAO over wages (and most federal government unions cannot do this). GAO worked hard to create the basis for a strong labor-management partnership. For example, the agency’s executive committee (which includes the comptroller general of the United States, the GAO CEO) meets quarterly with union leaders. GAO also formed a diversity committee, which includes representatives from the employee advisory council, the union, nonunion members, and representatives of liaison groups such as Blacks in Government.
In Alberta, Canada, the province’s union views the engagement survey as a way for its members to provide direct and anonymous feedback to the province’s senior management.
In some jurisdictions, laws prohibit labor unions from representing public-sector employees. In some of these locations, employees may join employee associations, which serve as a substitute for unions. These organizations also need to be brought into the engagement process.
DEALING WITH PUBLIC VISIBILITY AND SCRUTINY
The visibility of government, including laws requiring open records and meetings, means that public-sector managers committed to improving engagement need to take extra measures to make employees feel as safe and secure as possible. This includes helping employees feel comfortable voicing their opinions, taking risks, and innovating. Managers should strive for a culture that encourages innovation and insulates employees from adverse publicity as much as possible. My approach has always been to tell the people who report to me that if we’re successful, they get the credit. If we fail, it’s on me.
Public-sector managers also need to be particularly careful about how they relate to, communicate with, and most importantly, treat employees. Even emails and texts are subject to release to the media and the public. This transparency can be positive, however, because it accentuates the need for managers to treat their employees in ways that promote high levels of engagement. This involves having interactions and discussions about the following:
• How to create the workplace conditions and opportunities that enable them to excel
• How they can grow personally and professionally
• Whether they are satisfied with the recognition they receive
• How to build pride in their work and organization
• Whether they are satisfied with supervisors and leaders and, if not, why
LEVERAGING THE PUBLIC-SERVICE MOTIVATION
As described previously, public servants are motivated more by mission than financial or other extrinsic rewards and are therefore predisposed to respond to public-service missions, goals, and motives. Government agencies need to find these people, hire them, and then leverage their intrinsic motivation through engagement strategies. This involves the following:
• Identifying, aggressively recruiting, and then hiring job candidates who are motivated by public service
• After hiring these motivated employees, leveraging their public-service motivation as a strong driver of change by involving them in decision making and helping them see and appreciate their individual impacts (especially if financial rewards are limited)
ATTRACTING TALENT TO GOVERNMENT
Today, more than ever, government agencies need to very intentionally design recruiting and hiring strategies that will attract these public-service-motivated candidates. Hiring top talent is becoming a heavier lift for the public sector in part because the criticism of government has diminished interest in government careers.
Government has a lot of work to do to become an employer of choice, particularly on college campuses. As noted earlier, young people have become an endangered species in many public agencies. In the federal government, for example, only 3 percent of the workforce is under the age of 25. In the 2012 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, only 43 percent of the 687,000 federal employees who responded agreed that their “unit is able to recruit people with the right skills.” And that percentage was down from the previous two years.11
Today’s college graduates are more attracted to jobs in other sectors because employers in the private and nonprofit sectors have made the commitment to aggressively court top talent from campuses across the country. Plus, these organizations have refined their hiring approaches to make them inviting, efficient, user friendly, and timely.
Government’s failure to recruit new talent aggressively is particularly frustrating because, according to a survey of 8,000 college students, the top two most important criteria these students are using to make decisions about where to work are “career advancement opportunities” and “interesting, challenging work.”12 Government can deliver these opportunities.
However, too many public-sector agencies are still in a time warp, relying on user-unfriendly hiring methods that can take months. Government also has not focused enough on helping students who have public-service motivation recognize the opportunities government offers to satisfy their need to make a difference. To successfully compete for talent with the private and nonprofit sectors, government must understand the attitudes and expectations of college students about the world of work and about careers in government. Then agencies need to bring more to the table than a vague hint of a job opportunity, a complicated and confusing job application, and a lengthy hiring process.
The Partnership for Public Service conducts research on what it takes to attract new—and particularly young—talent to government.13 The Partnership’s research has shown that few college students (only 13 percent) are knowledgeable about federal job opportunities. As one student put it,
I am a student leader and senior here on campus and I have been sought out by companies as well as … Teach for America. Why can’t the government do the same? If I am being pursued and contacted on a regular basis by groups like Conoco and Teach for America it makes me feel very wanted and piques my interest.14
Some other key findings are as follows:
• When students were asked what might make them want to work in government, the highest-rated responses were “working on interesting issues” (82 percent), “good benefits” (77 percent), and “the opportunity to make a difference” (74 percent). In other words, aside from benefits (which, as we have noted, are already generous in government), the responses link to the public-service ethic.
• On the other hand, when asked about the biggest reason not to work in government, students said “too much bureaucracy” (53 percent), “don’t know what careers are available” (43 percent), and “salaries not high enough” (40 percent).
The Partnership has gone on record with a series of conclusions/lessons learned about how to attract today’s college graduates (and other candidates) to government:
• Publicize job opportunities. When candidates know about government job opportunities and how to apply for them, they are much more likely to be interested. Sounds self-evident, but government agencies often do not do a good job publicizing their job opportunities. Government must clearly communicate the benefits of public service and make a long-term investment in on-campus recruiting, including building long-term relationships with faculty, academic advisors, and career center professionals.
• Stress opportunities in government. A huge deterrent to government service is the widely held perception that government is overly bureaucratic and stifles individuality and creativity. To overcome this belief and tap into those who are motivated by public service, agencies need to stress the unique opportunities in government to do good and do well—that is, interesting work, an unparalleled ability to make a difference even early in their careers, competitive pay, and good benefits.
• Understand that high touch is as important as high tech. Although most students use the Internet to search for job leads and details about jobs, the most effective recruiters are the people students directly relate to—parents, friends, faculty, and advisors.
• Give students what they want, where they want it. Private-Sector firms and many nonprofits work hard to reach students and faculty where they live—both literally and figuratively. Government agencies should follow suit (e.g., by holding events where students are already gathered such as in classes, student organizations or clubs, or academic departments). It’s also important to include “people like me” in recruitment ads, fairs, and information sessions by featuring younger employees and alumni, as well as the diversity of the workforce. This puts a face on public service so students will see people with similar characteristics, talents, interests, and backgrounds working in government.
• Educate and enlist faculty and advisors as allies. To be effective, these potential allies must be equipped with pertinent and current information. Once faculty members are sold on government careers and have the information and tools they need, they will continue to highlight the public sector in their discussions and advice and even invite government speakers into their classrooms.
Government agencies need to recruit aggressively, including using technology efficiently. And that doesn’t mean just posting vacancies on the agency website (“post and pray”). It means aggressively promoting the mission of the agency and the potential to make a difference. It also means using technology such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
A recruiter from the National Institutes of Health described effective recruiting, perhaps somewhat indelicately, as being like the difference between trapping and hunting. Trappers put out a trap and wait for the prey to show up, while hunters aggressively seek out what they want. Government recruiters need to hunt, not trap.
Attracting young talent who have public-service motivation also means streamlining government application and hiring processes. This includes eliminating lengthy written submissions and the dreaded civil-service exams, which many of the best and brightest are loath to take. The days when a government agency could post a job announcement on a few bulletin boards or a website and then sit back and wait for the stream of qualified applicants to come flowing in are long gone. Even in a slow economy, the best candidates have options. Young people with public-service motivation are out there—government agencies must aggressively recruit and hire them. And when the economy does turn around and jobs are again plentiful, government needs to be ready to compete aggressively for the best talent in a tighter job market.
Teach for America: A Model for Recruiting and Hiring Talent
Founded in 1990, Teach for America (TFA) annually places more than 5,000 new teachers in 46 urban and rural areas across the country—all low-income and underserved. Its founder, Wendy Kopp, has executed on her belief that teachers, by going above and beyond traditional expectations, can enable students in low-income communities to achieve at high levels.
In just two decades, TFA has created a “brand” that the best and brightest want to be a part of, despite the enormous challenge of trying to educate children in the nation’s toughest environments. The nonprofit organization has become a premiere employer of choice. In 2011, TFA received 48,000 applications,15 many from top universities. At 55 colleges and universities—including Yale, North Carolina, Berkeley, Howard, Arizona State, and Washington University in St. Louis—TFA is the top employer of graduating seniors.16 TFA is also among Fortune magazine’s 2012 “Best Companies to Work For.”
How has TFA built such a strong brand?
The Mission
TFA has defined a mission that is clear, compelling, and actionable:
Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation’s most promising future leaders in the effort. We recruit outstanding recent college graduates from all backgrounds and career interests to commit to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools. We provide the training and ongoing support necessary to ensure their success as teachers in low-income communities.
Aggressive, Strategic, and Coordinated Recruiting
Each year, TFA recruiters, who are often former corps members, meet one on one with up to 30,000 students at hundreds of colleges. According to the TFA director of recruiting, “We are not in the business of just going after anybody. We are looking for a very specific person.” TFA doesn’t just put its opportunities on its website (“post and pray”). It understands that inspiring the best and brightest young people to devote two years to a tough job requires a high-touch approach including marketing, communicating, and relationship building.
Trained recruiters develop and implement marketing plans; cultivate high-potential students on campus; and build relationships with student leaders, faculty, administrators, corps members, and alumni.
Timely and Rigorous Timely Applicant Assessment Process
The process, from application to job offer, usually takes eight weeks. When it does take longer, TFA lets candidates know why. The organization’s website specifically outlines the entire hiring process—online application, phone interview, day-long interview, and assessment center. The TFA website posts specific milestone dates—not just the application deadline but also the date candidates can go online to find out if they’re going to get an interview, dates for phone interviews, and when candidates can go online again to find out if they’ve been invited to an in-person final interview. The site also includes projected dates for final offers and candidate decisions. Applicants know—in advance—what’s going to happen and when.
Comprehensive Onboarding and Continuous Training and Development
Because TFA primarily hires recent grads who were not education majors, the onboarding process is crucial to preparing new hires for the enormous challenges they will face.
The onboarding process starts when a new corps member accepts the TFA job offer. The day after my daughter said yes to TFA, a recruiter called her to discuss her new job and answer questions. The next week, a local rep arranged a conference call with the parents of the new Washington, DC, corps members to explain what their sons and daughters were getting into and answer questions.
Onboarding continues when each incoming corps member attends a five-week summer training institute. Corps members, my daughter included, describe the summer training institute as intense, challenging, and rewarding. Some corps members quit or wash out during training. (But it’s better to find this out during training than in the classroom.) The training institute is followed by a week-long induction in the location where each TFA teacher is assigned.
The TFA regional support network then provides professional development throughout each new teacher’s two-year commitment. Each corps member is assigned a regional program director who provides support, guidance, and feedback. Every month or so, my daughter joined other DC corps members in a day-long professional development session. Although she complained about having to give up a Saturday, this program demonstrates TFA’s commitment to its new teachers’ development.
TFA corps members also must become certified as teachers in their jurisdictions. TFA arranges with local universities to enable corps members to earn master’s degrees, funded in large part by AmeriCorps grants, which lead to certification.
Focus on Impact
The Teach for America model—putting talented new college grads in classrooms even though they didn’t major in education—is still controversial. But a growing body of research shows that corps members have a positive impact on student achievement. Research like this, which provides a direct line of sight between the work TFA teachers do and the TFA mission to eliminate educational inequality, is a powerful driver of recruiting success and employee engagement.
Commitment to Long-Term Career Support
A key TFA goal is to not just attract talent to education but also retain that talent. But TFA also understands that many of its corps members will go on to other careers after their initial two-year teaching commitment. No matter where alumni wind up, TFA tries to lay the foundation for a lifetime of advocacy on behalf of the Teach for America mission. Instead of fighting the inclination of millennials to move on to other things, TFA embraces this new reality with programs designed to help corps members make transitions and also create a strong alumni network.
A Model for Government
Many aspects of the TFA approach to acquiring and managing talent are transferable to government. The fundamentals—aggressive recruiting, clear communication about the hiring process, rigorous but timely candidate assessment, solid and thoughtful onboarding, continuous training and development, and a focus on measuring results and commitment to long-term career development—should be applied to public-sector hiring as well as building employee engagement.
As I’ve emphasized, the low level of employee engagement in the public sector is a good news—bad news story—the good news being that there is a huge upside to improving engagement in government. We’ve discussed the barriers to improving engagement and some ways to deal with these obstacles. Next, we’ll review how to assess the specific level of employee engagement in a jurisdiction or agency and then how to act on the results to improve it.