Making the federal government a "best place to work": implications on the first ever ranking of federal agencies by the Partnership for Public Service and American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation to promote excellence and improve performance within government

Public Manager, The, Spring-Summer, 2004 by Phil Beekman

When the Partnership for Public Service (PPS) and American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation (ISPPI) released the first ever rankings of the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government this past fall, people inside and outside of government took note. While workplace satisfaction rankings are old hat in the private sector--Fortune, AARP Magazine, Working Mother, and Computer World are among those now publishing specialized rankings--the public sector had remained largely untouched. The outpouring of interest in rankings of federal agencies (the Best Places Web site has garnered over 1.6 million hits since going live) signals a substantial appetite for information useful to those considering a career in public service. But this endeavor is not just geared toward those eager to answer the call to serve; a second and equally important goal is to inspire excellence in government performance.

Over the past two years, the Partnership has worked to help federal agencies make government the employer of choice for talented, dedicated Americans. One way to create an environment that fosters satisfaction and commitment is paying attention to the issues that matter most to employees. But while private sector firms have been using satisfaction surveys to tap the input of their employees for years, survey use in the public sector has been spotty at best. Our hope in creating the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government (www.bestplacestowork.org) is to give management a tool that focuses attention on the voices of their employees, the people who know government workplaces best.

The initial rankings provide a roadmap to better performance; marking what we hope will be the first round in a long-term effort to create an accurate and substantive measure of federal agency progress. Employee satisfaction plays a critical role in high performing organizations; by leveraging the needs and the knowledge of their employees, managers and leaders can make great strides in making their organization a "best place to work."

The Importance of Being a "Best Place To Work"

In the past few years, the federal government has faced unprecedented challenges; from protecting the nation from terrorist threats and responding to corporate malfeasance to internal transformation such as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. These challenges make high performance from our government institutions and from the 1.8 million civilian employees who work in government more important than ever.

Creating a Performance Culture Within Government ...

Metrics, or systems for measurement, are playing an increasingly important role in the federal human resources management dialogue. The President's Management Agenda (PMA), the Bush administration's initiative to adopt sound management practices, has served as the impetus for some of this attention. The central task of the PMA is to establish standards for success, measure and track agency performance across the federal government, and hold agency leadership responsible through a simple yet substantive scorecard. With human capital as the first of the five priorities articulated in the PMA, the past few years have seen a flurry of new attention inside government related to strategic management of employees. But the difficult issue is not convincing agency managers and leaders, including human resources managers, about the importance of metrics; the challenge is identifying metrics that are a meaningful and useful tool to help judge performance.

In the private sector, overall performance metrics can be relatively straightforward: profits, stock value, and productivity. But in the public sector, where missions vary widely and agencies are not limited to creating products or offering services, the issue is more difficult. Luckily for managers concerned about human capital, we can draw some similarities across sectors. Evidence in the private sector links high employee engagement, commitment, and satisfaction to increased productivity, higher customer satisfaction, and profitability. If employees in the public sector are not substantially different, satisfied and committed employees would be more productive, more attuned to the needs of their customer (the American people), and more successful at accomplishing the critical goals of their agency's mission.

Employee satisfaction data is a major contributor to what is often referred to as a balanced scorecard approach. Use of this approach--where managers take into account multiple dimensions of performance, from achieving results, to assuring both customer and employee satisfaction--has taken root in the private sector in the past few years. In the long run, the federal government hopes to measure agency performance by linking the programs and actions of agencies to specific performance outcomes. But while the difficult work of identifying those outcomes continues, agency managers and leaders can begin to utilize the tools in hand. Employee satisfaction data (much of which has already been collected from their workforce) can be a vital tool right now.