For the past decade or so, new technology and systems have been prominent in performance improvement initiatives. Scorecards and performance measurement have been promoted as an answer for performance problems. Over this period, the term human capital has become prominent in both business and government publications.

One of the threads that runs through books on this subject and is a frequent research topic is employee engagement. The repeated conclusion from those analyses is that employees with a heightened sense of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral connection to their work perform at higher levels. Stated differently, engaged employees have their hearts and minds committed to generating the results to make their employer successful.

Much of the analyses show the central and dominant factor in employee engagement is the effectiveness of a workers immediate supervisor. To this point, however, federal agencies have generally underinvested in the development of a cadre of frontline supervisors with the capabilities to engender the levels of engagement that will trigger improved performance.

The Power of Employee Engagement

In traditional management thinking, people are merely cogs in the wheel, easily replaced and sometimes even expendable. Efficiency experts analyzed worker activities and set performance standards. Managers and supervisors made the decisions.

This began to change when the 1990 recession forced U.S. companies to transform the way they were managed to become more competitive. The downturn triggered the idea of reengineering as companies sought ways to improve operations. These changes marked a shift away from tight management control to greater employee empowerment.

The key to that shift is accepting the idea that employees at all levels should be managed as a key asset in achieving organizational success. This was first highlighted by the investment community and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which held an early conference on intellectual capital. For a rapidly growing list of companies such as Microsoft and Google, in which assets walk out the door every night, effectively managing knowledge workers is central to core strategy. That is obviously true for government as well.

Knowledge workers are most valuable when they are empowered to use their knowledge. That involves far more autonomy and trust from their supervisorsa viewpoint that is difficult for some managers to accept. This involves a redefinition of the supervisors role and the renegotiation of what is referred to as the psychological contract with workers. It will take time for both sides to become comfortable, and it is only successful if employees and supervisors have the requisite job skills and can develop a shared sense of responsibility for achieving unit goals.

This commitment to job success is often referred to as employee engagement. Its been defined by one prominent research organization as a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization, that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work.

Researchers have explored a long list of job and work system elements to develop an understanding of what contributes to that emotional connection. The common thread running through the many studies is the importance of frontline supervisors because they reside at the point of contact for the relationship between organizations and employees.

Gallups Q12

Gallup got on the employee engagement bandwagon nearly a decade ago when it used its extensive survey database to look at the relationship between employee views of their work experience and performance. They identified 12 survey questionsthe Gallups Q12that high performers typically answer differently than poor performers. They now use the responses to categorize employees as engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged. The actively disengaged are usually problem employees.

Gallups analyses confirm that engaged employees perform better. Because results or productivity cannot be measured for many jobs, they focus on a series of universal measures, including grievances, customer satisfaction, turnover and absenteeism, quality and safety, and general profitability. Those organizations with an engaged workforce score higher across the measures.

The Gallup gauge of an organizations situation is the ratio of engaged employees to those who are actively disengaged. Their analyses of worldclass companies show that engaged employees outnumber the actively disengaged by almost 10:1. For average performing companies, the ratio is less than 2:1.

Significantly, Gallups analyses show that public employers have fewer engaged and more actively disengaged employees than private industry. According to data from their clientsmore than 500 organizations and over 6.5 million respondentsfrom 2007 to 2009:

  • government employers have 29 percent engaged employees compared with the overall database of 43 percent
  • government employers have 53 percent nonengaged employees compared with the overall database of 44 percent
  • government employers have 18 percent actively disengaged employees compared with the overall database of 13 percent
  • the ration of engaged to actively disengaged for government is 1.6:1, and more than double that for the overall database of 3.3:1.

The Gallup website reports that the majority of public employeesthose who are not engagedcome to work, do what they are asked to do, but do not do more than required.

Tapping Underused Employee Capabilities

True high performance does not flow from technology or expert analyses. Those initiatives typically lead to incremental productivity gains, which are important but far below the potential when workers are fully engaged. Meta-analysis that looked at several hundred productivity studies concluded that with an integrated workforce strategy, employers can expect performance gains of at least 30 to 40 percent.

The breakthrough gains come when workers are committed to the organizations success and empowered to use their full capabilities. The typical worker, in public and private organizations, has a job with assigned duties that are routine and undemanding. This is compounded in government by rules and regulations that impede workers from tackling and solving new problems.

Pockets of high performance can be attributable to the way employees are managed. Supervisors make the difference. High performance involves managers who understand how to engage their people. They enable employees to be comfortable showing initiative and tackling problems.

Supporting Improved Supervisor Effectiveness

Studies are often silent on another important consideration: supervisors also perform at their best when they are engaged. The last thing any agency needs is an actively disengaged manager. Stated positively: the goal of creating a highly engaged workforce should be a priority at every level.

Within government, people often choose public service as their career as opposed to their particular niche. Their decision to become a manager happens later.

While it was common in the past to select supervisors based primarily on their technical skills, organizations today base decisions on a candidates soft skills, such as emotional intelligence. Technical skills are still important, especially for jobs that involve complex technical problems, but a key selection factor includes an individuals ability to develop effective working relationships.

To develop effective and engaged supervisors, training is essential. New supervisors still need to study the basicsregulations, appraisal forms, goal setting, and so forthbut they also need the know-how to handle unexpected problems. This suggests implementing access to just-in-time e-learning resources focused on specific issues.

Performance Should Have Consequences

The primary concern, is helping supervisors develop effective coaching and mentoring styles. A key step in the process is an honest evaluation of individual strengths and weaknesses, focusing on practices such as providing feedback known to contribute to engagement. Ideally the process should involve input from their staff as well as peers.

There is a widely used model for evaluating managers and supervisors: the criteria are referred to as the what and the how. The what (results) may not be obvious to every supervisor, but the how (important behaviors and competencies) can always be defined. People always need feedback if they are to improve; this is especially true for newly promoted supervisors because they need to master new skills.

Support is wasted, however, if there is an inadequate commitment to developing more effective supervisors. Agency leaders need to make developing supervisors and leaders a priority. Buy-in for this from all levels of management will ultimately lead to increased employee engagement and improved organizational performance.

The next step is linking positive consequences for high performance. The most straightforward policy for achieving this is pay for performance. In government it is sometimes difficult to hold supervisors accountable for results, but employee engagement scores are a fully defensible and logical indicator of a supervisors effectiveness that can be linked to salary increases.