Recruiting and engaging the federal workforce: a recent seminar examines employee motivation from three perspectives

Public Manager, The, Spring, 2008 by Bill Trahant

Perry's other suggestions for capitalizing on public-service motivation during the recruitment and hiring process include developing work systems and processes that enhance employee self-determination and encouraging employee input into goal setting--both of which encourage personal empowerment and job ownership. "Research on goal setting has increasingly emphasized that in complex settings, employee input into setting goals not only encourages workers to find more effective strategies [to do their jobs] but may also energize behavior and increase employees' perceptions that they can effectively accomplish their goals."

Perry's research on how public-sector managers can better leverage public-service motivation in employees will soon be published in a book, Motivation in Public Management: The Call of Public Service. The book is coedited by Annie Hondeghem from Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium, and is scheduled for publication in May 2008 by Oxford University Press. It will outline specific tactics and strategies that government managers can use to make interest in public service a centerpiece of their recruitment, retention, and human resource management activities.

NASA Employee Motivation

Like Perry, Toni Dawsey, assistant administrator for human capital management and chief human capital officer at NASA, also had employee public-service motivation on her mind as she spoke to seminar attendees. Dawsey's job at NASA is to help the agency transform itself for new mission challenges that lie just ahead, including the retirement of the space shuttle in 2010, completion of the International Space Station, and rollout of NASA's Constellation program, which will develop new space vehicles to explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Addressing all three challenges involves a huge mission shift for NASA--from its current focus on operations (shuttle launches and missions) to one on research and development to implement the Constellation program. The shift depends largely on NASA employees, whose prized technical, scientific, and engineering skills will be critical to all three endeavors.

In the next few years, NASA must retain much of its in-house technical talent to safely execute the remaining shuttle missions. At the same time, it must begin to transition certain shuttle program employees into research and development jobs associated with the Constellation program, recruit more critical-skill workers to fill jobs as part of future Constellation flight operations, and manage targeted attrition efforts across the organization-- all this without impairing operations or lowering employee morale.

A team of officials and representatives from various NASA centers of operation is now mapping the skills and competencies of the shuttle workforce to migrate shuttle program employees to Constellation work, phased to correspond to key milestones in all of NASA's current activities, according to Dawsey. Their work has enormous implications for NASA's future mission capability, she said.