Robert Lavigna - Engaging Government Employees: Motivate and Inspire Your People to Achieve Superior Performance

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This is not an easy time to be employed in the public sector. Heated budget battles and rhetoric about the size, function, scope, and effectiveness of government have generated criticism not just of government but also of the public servants who deliver government services. Across the countryin Congress, state legislatures, city councils, political speeches and ads, the media, and elsewheregovernment organizations and their employees are denigrated and stigmatized as underworked and overpaid.

In stark contrast, in the not-too-distant past, government service was a respected professiondescribed as a noble calling by President George H. W. Bush. The best and brightest across our nation aspired to make a difference by devoting their careers to public service, whether it was in Washington, DC, crafting national policies, or in their local communities, protecting their neighbors, teaching their children, or helping in countless other ways.

Sadly, opinion has changed, and the public no longer views government as a noble calling.

Writer and philosopher Alex Pattakos, a strong proponent of the public service, has cited this cynical joke: Why doesnt the civil servant look out her window in the morning? Answer: So shell have something to do in the afternoon.

And so on.

Those who criticize government, and the people who work in government, have lost sight of the critically important work of the public sector. This work affects everyonenationally, in our states, and in our local communities. At the same time government is being castigated and hamstrung by budget cuts, the public continues to ask the public sector to solve some of the toughest and most intractable problems: fixing the economy, putting people back to work, supporting a war that has stubbornly persisted for a decade, protecting the public, maintaining the quality of life in our communities, eliminating poverty, expanding opportunity by improving the education system, providing affordable health care, and so on.

And, as we tragically learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when government fails, people can die.

This paradoxattacking public servants while at the same time expecting them to solve problems no other sector can handleplaces government leaders and managers squarely in the middle of an extremely difficult situation. Those who lead the 18,000,000-strong public-sector workforce, the nations largest, must somehow find ways to motivate their employees despite harsh public criticism and shrinking resources.

How can these public-sector leaders, from senior-level executives to frontline supervisors, meet this challenge?

One proven solution is to improve the level of employee engagement in their organizations and agencies. After all, the primary resource we have in government is our talentour people. If they perform well, government performs well.

But what is employee engagement and why does it matter? The concept has been around for decades but has come into much greater focus in

There is strong research-based evidence for why managers should care about employee engagement. Simply put, organizations with engaged employees outperform organizations whose employees are not engaged. This is true in both the public and private sectors.

For example, the Gallup organization, best known for its public-opinion polling, has also systematically studied employee engagement by analyzing engagement surveys of millions of employees. Gallups research reveals that high-engagement organizations outperform low-engagement organizations in seven critical areas: profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction, retention, absenteeism, safety, and lost or stolen inventory. According to Gallup, high-engagement organizations are almost 20 percent more productive than their low-engagement counterparts.

But how do these results translate to government, which usually doesnt rely on measures like profitability? The Gallup research shows that improved engagement drives outcomes that are also important in government, like productivity, customer satisfaction, and retention. Think about what a 20 percent improvement in productivity would do for your organization, jurisdiction, agency, or work unit.