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The Role of Human Resources
As I’ve tried to emphasize, measuring and improving employee engagement in government is not “HR stuff.” Instead, employee engagement should be a fundamental responsibility of the entire organization, including leaders, managers, supervisors, and rank-and-file employees.
But as an HR guy myself, I would be remiss if this book didn’t also address the role of human resources in helping government jurisdictions and agencies achieve higher levels of employee engagement.
Helping the jurisdiction/agency improve employee engagement is an opportunity for HR to make a highly visible and highly significant impact. Human resources departments often complain about not having a “seat at the table” where key decisions are being made. Improving employee engagement is this kind of opportunity, but HR must bring something to that table.
This means playing an influential role in improving employee engagement, including serving as the catalyst to help improve engagement across the entire jurisdiction or agency. In public-sector organizations that have conducted engagement surveys, human resources has been a champion and guiding force, by advocating for collecting engagement survey data, putting in place the survey process, and then driving (or at least facilitating) strategies to act on the data.
First, HR needs to champion the value of employee engagement. This means understanding what engagement is, why it matters, and how to improve it and then advocating for taking action. Advocacy includes broadly and aggressively communicating the business case for engagement and also building momentum for surveying employees and then acting on the data. HR should also provide (or help find) the resources and tools to conduct engagement surveys and help work units analyze and take action on the results.
For many HR units in government, providing this kind of leadership and support will mean moving out of the comfort zone (developing policies, handling personnel transactions, and regulating agency personnel activities) into new and perhaps unfamiliar territories (delivering service and developing new and more strategic capabilities as a true business partner) and then delivering measurable results. This can be a real opportunity for HR to step up and help the organization meet the challenge of attracting, developing, and retaining talent. Making this transition also means developing new competencies, as described by the International Public Management Association for Human Resources (see box).
Human Resources Competency Model
The International Public Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR) is the professional association for government human resources leaders and professionals. IPMA-HR has developed an HR “competency model” that goes well beyond the traditional technical and transactional orientation of HR. A competency is a set of behaviors (skills, knowledge, abilities, and personal attributes) that, taken together, are critical to achieving the organization’s strategy.1
The IPMA-HR model includes 20 specific competencies in three broad areas—business partner, change agent, and leader. The competencies focus on transitioning HR from its role as a regulator and transaction processor to a strategic business partner. HR’s ability to help public-sector agencies measure and improve engagement is directly linked to mastering these competencies. The specific skills and behaviors associated with the competencies are as follows:
Business Partner
• Understand the organization’s mission, vision, and values and the business plan for execution.
• Be innovative, creating and sustaining a positive environment that supports calculated risk taking.
• Apply organizational development principles.
• Link specific human-resource initiatives to the larger organization’s mission and service deliverables.
Change Agent
• Design and implement change by altering systems and procedures.
• Use return-on-investment and information-technology strategies in the practice of human-resource management.
• Effectively design, develop, and implement HR and organizational processes for all customers, including in the context of organizational and/or political resistance.
• Design and deliver marketing programs related to sourcing and selection of human capital (i.e., aggressively market career opportunities).
Leader
• Understand and effectively utilize the current and potential contributions of a workforce that is maximized in terms of all aspects of diversity.
• Practice integrity and ongoing ethics-based leadership behavior in all circumstances, including those that may jeopardize the professional future of the human resources leader.
Shared Competencies That Cut Across Roles
• Understand business process and how to change to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
• Have knowledge of human-resource laws and policies.
• Understand the public-service environment.
• Understand team behavior and lead teams toward high performance.
• Successfully communicate, verbally and in writing, including using persuasive public presentations on behalf of the human resources function.
• Assess and balance the competing values found within the organization (i.e., the larger mission and vision, various department values, values as demonstrated by executive and midmanagement leadership).
• Use business-systems skills, including thinking strategically and creatively.
• Analyze issues, recognizing the needs of all stakeholders for collaborative solutions.
• Use negotiating skills, including consensus building, coalition building, and dispute resolution.
• Build and sustain trust-based relationships, both individually and collectively over time.2
Human resources departments should also model how to measure and improve engagement in their own units. While HR should make this commitment for all aspects of talent management, this leadership is particularly critical for employee engagement and particularly in government, where lasting change usually requires cultural change. It is difficult for HR to tell the rest of the organization to focus on improving engagement if HR itself has not made this commitment.
At the University of Wisconsin, we piloted the engagement survey first in HR for several reasons: first, to work out any kinks in the design and administration of the survey. But, just as important, we took this on first in HR to show the campus that we were not just telling them to focus on engagement; we were doing it first ourselves. We also shared our initial survey results with the other divisions. Given that not all our survey results were positive, this transparency was a bit risky—and also a bit uncomfortable for us—but we believed it was important for the credibility of the engagement process and for the credibility of HR itself.
HR should also provide technical assistance to plan, develop, and administer the survey; report and analyze the data; and act on the results. Operationally, this can mean the central HR office actually conducts the survey, like the central HR offices in the U.S. and U.K. national governments already do. Or, if the agency uses a contractor, this can mean that HR manages the contractor’s work. What follows is a summary of HR’s specific roles and responsibilities in the employee-engagement process.
PLANNING THE SURVEY
HR’s role includes facilitating key decisions such as who will manage the survey process, what survey will be used (i.e., if the organization will make it or buy it), when and how to survey, how results will be reported and analyzed, and how to communicate about the initiative.
HR should lead conversations about planning issues such as whether reports will include an overall engagement index score, a question-by-question summary with mean scores, favorable versus unfavorable percentages, narrative comments, and so on. Will engagement drivers be calculated? Will results be reported in spreadsheets, a narrative report, a PowerPoint summary, or something else? HR needs to understand these issues and recommend answers to these questions.
HR can also help individual work units decide what formats and data reports they want (e.g., results by work units, individual managers, demographic groups). At the University of Wisconsin, while we used standard reporting formats (Excel spreadsheets), we also consulted with each unit to determine the level of detail the units wanted. One division director wanted the data broken down into his 26 individual work units. Even though assembling all these data was complicated, we made sure he got what he wanted.
Typically, HR will either conduct or coordinate the survey (if an outside organization administers the survey). HR must have or develop enough expertise to understand, explain, and implement the survey methodology. This includes the survey questions as well as how the survey will be administered (e.g., online only or with paper surveys for employees who can’t access computers at work). Does the agency need to translate the survey for employees who don’t speak English as their native language? How will the agency follow up to maximize the response rate?
SUMMARIZING, DISTRIBUTING, AND ANALYZING RESULTS
Human resources should help design the analytical approach and reporting format and then coordinate the distribution of the results. For example, in the province of Alberta, the engagement-survey contractors provide the survey results first to HR and the province’s deputy ministers, who then distribute the results across their organizations.
At the Air Force Materiel Command, which used the Gallup Q12 survey, HR receives the results first, reviews, and then distributes them, initially to senior leadership and then to all employees. In Minneapolis, after each survey, HR meets with the head of each department and the department survey champion to discuss survey results, areas that have been identified for improvements, and potential initiatives to increase scores.
The state of Washington HR department manages the biennial employee survey process, including posting the agency-by-agency results on the state HR website for all employees to view.
If the survey results show that specific units have high levels of engagement, HR should identify what these units are doing well and serve as a clearinghouse to share the information across the entire jurisdiction/agency. That’s what the University of Wisconsin Hospital “Best-in-Class Library of Action Steps” (developed and managed by HR) is designed to do—publicize good ideas that units have implemented in response to employee-engagement survey results.
Human resources can also help units analyze their individual results and act on them. At the university, HR assembled a “data manager” group that included representatives from each of 13 divisions that participated in the survey. This group helped design the survey reports and was also tasked with explaining the results to division leaders and the rank-and-file employees. We also provided support to action teams in the individual units, including providing team facilitators and consulting on how to analyze and act on the survey data.
IDENTIFYING AND ADDRESSING ENGAGEMENT ISSUES IN THE HR ORGANIZATION ITSELF
Human resources should also analyze and take action on the engagement survey results for its own employees. This is not only essential for the employees who work in HR but also important for the credibility of the overall engagement initiative. This helps dispel the “do as we say, not as we do” perception that often plagues HR.
The city of Juneau, Alaska, for example, took the engagement survey results to heart in part because the results had implications for HR’s own operations. The data showed that HR itself needed to step up its own communications. HR staff members now continually ask themselves these questions: Who needs to know? Why? How can we inform them?
At the University of Wisconsin, we piloted the engagement survey first in HR and then shared our results with the other 12 divisions who would be surveyed once we rolled it out full scale. By showing these executives the results from our pilot survey, we made it clear that we too were committed to putting our house in order.
IDENTIFYING AND IMPLEMENTING ENTERPRISE-WIDE CHANGES
As the coordinator of the engagement survey and the recipient of the results, HR is in the best position to analyze the survey results and look across the agency to understand where organization-specific changes are needed—that is, where the data reveal issues and problems that are not isolated to specific units but cut across the entire organization and therefore call for enterprise-wide solutions. I’ve identified several of these approaches: incorporating engagement into organizational values and strategy, building managerial competencies linked to employee engagement, developing and delivering training on engagement, mounting a cultural change campaign to focus on engagement, instituting new employee recognition programs, and holding managers accountable for improving engagement. HR is uniquely positioned to see across the organization and, if HR itself has the right competencies, to design and lead enterprise-wide solutions.
In the city of Minneapolis, for example, the citywide alternate work arrangement policy and program were spearheaded by HR in response to engagement survey results. The most recent Minneapolis employee-engagement survey revealed that a major employee concern was not feeling valued, including being dissatisfied with recognition programs. As I have detailed, this is a common issue in the public sector where financial rewards are severely limited. As a result, in Minneapolis, HR is considering ways to implement citywide strategies to improve employee recognition.
The HR department can play a key role in designing, implementing, and acting on an employee-engagement survey. This can require HR to develop new capabilities. However, improving engagement should not be an “HR project.” Instead, measuring and improving the initiative should be a shared responsibility across the organization, jurisdiction, or agency, with HR providing leadership, expertise, coordination, and support.