April 5th, 2012

The following is a full transcript of FedCentral’s interview with John Palguta, Vice-President of Policy, Partnership for Public Service and David Dye, Director, Federal Human Capital, Deloitte Consulting LLP conducted by Jane Norris on April 5, 2012.

Jane Norris
Welcome to FedCentral brought to you by Deloitte, a program where executives and federal government leaders talk about the issues and initiatives that are making a real impact on the business of government today, to help government help America.

In an era of shrinking budgets and increasing demands for high-quality services, productivity improvement is critical to performance outcomes. So how can public sector organizations meet those fiscal requirements while sustaining effective performance levels?

Today on FedCentral, we’ll discuss employee engagement strategies used to improve performance and increase workforce productivity to enable mission success, and joining us on the show today is John Palguta, Vice-President for Policy at the Partnership for Public Service. John served in government for 34 years at agencies like the Merit System’s Protection Board in the Office of Personnel Management. At the Partnership, John is responsible for comprehensive programs of review and analysis of human capital issues in the federal government.

He was instrumental in the development of one of the Partnership’s premier initiatives, the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings. He also manages the Partnership’s Federal Human Capital Collaborative.

Also joining us is David Dye, a Director of Federal Human Capital at Deloitte Consulting. David has more than 25 years of executive leadership experience in the federal and commercial sectors. In the Federal government, he spent ten years at the Office of Personnel Management and in those capacities he contributed to the improved performance of employees, work teams, and organizations. As a director in the Human Capital Practice, he assists clients in developing human capital programs to achieve organizational strategy and mission. Currently, he is the lead executive working with the Partnership for Public Service in support of the Best Places to Work program. Hear a common theme here, right; The Best Places to Work Program.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here today. It’s a pleasure to be on the show with you.

John Palguta
It’s a pleasure to be here, Jane. Thank you.

David Dye
Thanks for having me, Jane, nice to be here.

Jane Norris
Oh, it’s great to have you both. So let’s talk about employee engagement, which is really what the rankings are all about, the Best Places to Work in Government. So why should agency leaders be concerned about how engaged their employees are? David, I’ll ask you.

David Dye
Sure, well, I’ll just take a minute out and talk about what employee engagement is? We’ve actually seen resurgence in our government and private sector organizations about the importance of it, so to us, it’s more than just how happy people are and how satisfied they are with their jobs. It really connotes more than cooperation or satisfaction. It’s really about being committed, capturing both levels of effort and commitment. So at the end of the day, how much discretionary effort are employees putting toward being high-performers and helping their agencies accomplish their mission? And so the extent to which people enjoy and believe in what they do and the perception that they’re going to be rewarded for that I think is a really important aspect of employee engagement today.

Jane Norris
John?

John Palguta
Ah, well, he’s absolutely right, and what I’d like to say is that it’s not about happy employees; that’s a side benefit. It’s about effective organizations. You know, in research terms, it’s the findings. If your employees are dissatisfied coming into work, they don’t like their boss, they’re not wild about the environment, they may show up for the paycheck, but they’re not going to give you their best effort. On the other hand, if they’re engaged, they’re committed, they look forward to coming in, getting the mission accomplished. Obviously, they’re giving you better effort and it’s a more productive workforce. So it’s all about getting the job done and at the same time, the nice thing is if you’re being fair to employee and they’re engaged, they’re also feeling good about being there.

Jane Norris
Do you think agencies are making the connection between the Best Places to Work survey and employee engagement? Do they look for those statistics within their agencies to help them drive improvement? Have you been seeing that?

David Dye
Well, I think they have, and John can speak more in-depth about what the Best Places to Work rankings have meant. I mean, it’s hit The Washington Post the last few years on the front page, so obviously it’s having a lot of visibility, but there’s more than that I think. There’s the research basis behind this, and some of that research shows that there’s a lot to say about how high-performing employees are and what impact that has on an agency being successful. There’s a relationship to customer satisfaction. There’s a relationship to performance, to productivity, to quality defects, to safety on the job. So it’s not just a good thing to do but it’s actually a thing that contributes to organization mission success.

John Palguta
Yeah, and actually since I was there at the beginning of the Best Places effort, it’s been a great evolution to follow. When we started this – the first rankings were in 2003 – we had a lot of anxiety among agency leaders and kind of a oh, don’t do this, please. You know, what if we’re not at the top of the rankings, and over the next couple years, it started changing where they understood it wasn’t a threat. It was something that could be useful to them and now, Jane, I really do see agencies taking this seriously. They get it. They understand that engaged employees are about organizational effectiveness and they’re looking for now answers. It’s not just— should we have engaged employees; it’s how do we get engaged employees? How do we increase our scores and, improve our rankings because we understand it’s a good thing to do?

Jane Norris
So talk to me about the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings. Which areas do well, it’s probably two answers to this. Which areas do agency leaders think are most important and prioritize and what about the employees themselves? Are there differences between the two views?

John Palguta
Well, there can be, Jane, and first of all, just so the listeners understand, the Best Places rankings are very simple and transparent, and of course, would not be possible but for the federal employee viewpoints survey conducted by the Office of Personnel Management. So, they do the survey. We’re using the data, but the overall ranking is really based on employee responses to three questions from this longer survey – how satisfied are you with your job, how satisfied are you with your organization, and would you recommend your organization as a good place to work to others? So the more favorable the responses to those questions, the higher your ranking.

But to answer your question, there are a lot of other questions in the OPM survey that we also take a look at, questions about leadership and teamwork and skills mission match. These are questions about your job making good use of your skills and abilities.

So we take a look at the interplay of all of those other questions to that overall satisfaction commitment issue, and we typically find that leadership is a number one driver in terms of being highly correlated with overall satisfaction. This issue of skills mission match becomes very important, and that includes things like, I like the kind of work I do, the work I do is important, I get a feeling of personal accomplishment and all that.

And then the third main driver, and we have ten dimensions, but the third one that’s popped up the last couple years for a lot of agencies is this question of pay, not that agencies can do a lot about it, but it’s something that employees are thinking about as they’re now under this second year of a pay freeze and calls for extended freezes.

Finally, there is sometimes a difference in perception between managers and employees, and one of the things we do is a manager’s employee alignment score. You know, it really works best if managers and employees see the world the same in an organization, and we have a way of measuring whether or not that’s true, and it varies by agencies, and some agencies are very much aligned. They do see the world the same, and in other places it’s like they must be working in two entirely different agencies because their responses are showing some marked differences.

Jane Norris
So David, I want to ask you, how do you see agency leaders responding to these surveys? Do they use them to reset the way they interact with their employees or initiate some new programs, or how do they use them?

David Dye
Yeah, great question. Actually, I think it differs quite a bit. As John said, the Best Places to Work program had been around since 2003, and I think there’s been a maturity and progress that’s been made, but I think the progress differs. A lot of what drives that progress is the emphasis and focus that leaders, particularly senior leaders, put on that. So having data is one thing. Acting on the data is another thing, and communicating with your workforce about what progress is occurring is another part of it. So we’ve actually seen the most successful organizations were where the top leadership really takes an interest. I was down in Atlanta at the Center for Disease Control couple weeks ago and I was meeting with their executive team. This was driven by the Chief Operating Officer and their executive team. That, to me, is the kind of commitment that agencies need to put in place to make sure that not only are they doing the right things but they’re communicating and having the workforce embrace those initiatives.

Jane Norris
And have you seen agencies go from mid-pack to top of the pack or bottom of the pack to mid-pack? Have you seen changes because they’ve implemented new policies as a result?

John Palguta
Yeah, absolutely, Jane. This is actually one of the exciting parts of watching what agencies are doing because if anybody’s out there thinking well, you know, it is what it is and either employees are engaged or they’re not, we have data that shows that that’s not the case. We have agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, for example, which in 2005 was number 21, I think in the rankings – or I’ll just take it back, number 25. This last year, the 2011 rankings, they went to number one.

Jane Norris
Wow.

John Palguta
Now it goes both ways. You know, to any of my friends over at the Securities and Exchange Commission, they well know they were number three among 30 large agencies, and this last year they went down to somewhere in the mid-20s. So, there are things you can do, and this is the important, I think one of the very important things here. There are things you can do proactively as managers to improve employee engagement and if you don’t stay on top of things, there are pressures out there that can cause you to lose that engagement, too.

David Dye
Yeah, John, I was going to add to that employee engagement is a universal thing and different types of organizations still can benefit from doing initiatives that improve that, and I know you do profiles of those organizations that move up in the rankings. You mentioned FDIC shooting to the top, but OPM is one of those that moved up, as well as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

John Palguta
Absolutely.

David Dye
As well as the Patent and Trademark Office, and those workforces are different but they still have opportunities to move up.

John Palguta
Yes, and I’m glad you mentioned that, David, because not only Bureau of Engraving and Printing but the Bureau of – you know, they have a number of blue-collar workers. It’s not just the sexy mission agencies with highly skilled employees. It’s across the board. We’ve seen organizations with entirely different workforce demographics go up and down. So any organization can be a “Best Place to Work.”

Jane Norris
And as these organizations grow, organically and start to add new employees, younger employees, I imagine technology is playing some role in their level of satisfaction. Can we touch on that briefly and we’ll take a quick break here and maybe come back and delve into that a little more seriously.

John Palguta
That’d be great.

David Dye
So actually on that point, this is maybe where I’m a little bit old-school. While I think technology’s changing, and the workforce is changing before our very eyes, a lot of the principles of employee engagement still hold. So while the Baby Boomers are retiring and the Gen X’s and Y’s are coming into the workforce, I think some of same principles stand.

Jane Norris
So you mean to tell me they don’t run screaming for the exits if they don’t have social media in their agency? What?

John Palguta
Well, I think the thing is they do, Jane. I agree with David. The principles remain the same, but the tools and techniques change. Communication is a huge issue when you’re trying to engage your workforce, and I think what we’re seeing in terms of social media is agencies are learning how to use some of those tools to better communicate with employees and get the message across and to get their input.

Jane Norris
Well, we’re going to come back and talk more about what specifics people that are coming into agencies might be looking for. We’ll be back in just a moment. We’re on FedCentral here on Federal News Radio 1500 AM. My guests, John Palguta, Vice-President for Policy at the Partnership for Public Service, and David Dye, Director of Federal Human Capital, Deloitte Consulting, LLP. You’re listening to FedCentral on Federal News Radio 1500 AM. I’m Jane Norris.

Welcome back to FedCentral brought to you by Deloitte, and today we’re talking about the area of – that every agency is dealing with, the era of shrinking budgets and increasing demands but still, a call for you know, high-quality performance management among employees So we’re talking with the – you know, the people that know this best, John Palguta, Vice-President for Policy at the Partnership for Public Service, and also David Dye, Director, Federal Human Capital at Deloitte Consulting, LLP.

So gentlemen, we left on the topic of technology and how it impacts your ability to recruit in the federal government and to retain talent. What are some of the new trends that you see a multi-generational workforce wanting in the federal government? What would really assist them in developing their own personal or interpersonal relationships for building the business of government. John, why don’t you start?

John Palguta
Well, as we were talking, Jane, the whole idea of how you communicate and how you get information up and down in an organization is extremely important. As we’ve looked at the agencies that have done well, particularly those that have improved dramatically in the rankings, communication played a big role, and what we’re seeing is that those agencies are using social media. They’re using other methods of electronic communication to enhance that basic human exchange of views and information and collaboration. So even the National Archives and Records Administration, the new archivist came in and wanted to better connect with employees there. They’re still struggling in the rankings but one of the things he did was a YouTube video about why he needed to hear from employees and – and sent the YouTube video out to encourage employees to respond. Now they got over an 80% response rate—

Jane Norris
Wow.

John Palguta
in the last survey, which was really remarkable because they’re spread all over the place. The Transportation Security Agency – you know, that’s a very dispersed workforce. Those are the Transportation Security Officers – otherwise some of them known as baggage screeners, and to communicate with that diverse workforce is a challenge, but one of the things they piloted was this thing called Idea Factory, which has now spread to other agencies. It’s a way for employees to provide ideas about improving the work flow, the work environment, and so on, and it’s captured electronically. There’s a team of folks devoted to making sure that you know, it gets sent to folks who can do something about it. Other employees can see the suggestions and vote on them, and then there’s follow-up to make sure that those ideas that are worth implementing are indeed implemented.

We’ve seen at Department of Treasury, back when Hank Paulson was Secretary of Treasury and he started this big effort at becoming an employer of choice. It started with an all-hands meetings in one of their ornate meeting rooms, but it was webcast to all employees so that everybody could be involved. Federal Labor Relations Authority – Carol Pope came in as the new head of FLRA. They were at the bottom of the rankings. They’re now, number seven among 33 small agencies, but she had the first virtual town hall meeting where everybody got a chance to be connected at the same time and exchange information.

I think it’s just, Jane, it’s a set of tools that savvy managers, even older ones like me, are learning that yeah, these are great tools out there, and if I don’t know how to use them as efficiently as possible, I can hire people who are very good at that, or I can hire folks to help me from outside government to learn how to better tap into that technology.

Jane Norris
So David, it’s not the iPhone that people are clamoring for in government?

David Dye
Well, I just got an iPhone last week, and I’m loving it, so –

Jane Norris
I know. So maybe they are clamoring.

David Dye
Well, I want to go back to what I said earlier. I think there are some things around the principles of employee engagement that have not changed. Everyone wants to be rewarded for doing a great job. Everyone wants to have an inspiring leader. Everyone wants to have a supervisor manager that has their back and gives them the resources to be their best. I think what is changing is the expectations and some of the ways that our younger workforce wants and needs to collaborate and be networked. They’re tech savvy, they want to work across boundaries, they want to have multiple jobs in their career, they want to move around. So while I think a lot of the principles are still the same, I think technology and the expectations for collaboration networking is maybe what makes things different.

I got a couple of ideas for you and maybe perhaps appealing to the younger generations. One is I think building collaboration spaces. I think literally having physical ways for people to interact, meet and greet, even on a casual basis to share and build relationships. Second is the idea of rotations. I think people want to have different types of experiences in jobs, so rotating in different parts of your agency, even moving outside your agency, is something I think appeals to folks.

And then lastly, we’ve done some work in this area on a notion called FedCloud, which is sort of the people’s side of cloud technology that you think about in IT, and people are demanding different ways of working on a diversity of problems. So how do we build a FedCloud, if you will, to accomplish complex problems and get people out of their comfort zone and let them work on things that they’re passion about?

Jane Norris
Well, those are all ideas that are technology-driven but not necessarily the devices themselves, so interesting that that would be something that would draw in a multi-generational workforce. So let’s talk about that in the context of the new fiscal demands that agencies are facing. I think there is an environment now and into the foreseeable future where agency budgets will be under great pressure, and so this is going to probably require agency managers to take a look at their workforce and maybe reset the workforce in some way that Congress will either ask them to or ask them at least very much to review. So how do you use performance management in this era of fiscal pressure? What advice can you give there, David?

David Dye
I want to go back and just say a lot of this seems easy and common sense. However, if that was the case, we’d probably have everybody be a best place to work and that’s not the case. What I do think is that employee engagement is a value today that if people are inspired and feel that there’s going to be recognition for doing a good job, then I have an opportunity as an employee to use my discretionary time and effort to be the best that I can be. So if you think about this from a doing more with less or doing the same with less, if we have people exerting more discretionary time to be their best, then in fact we are accomplishing more with less or accomplishing the same with less, but it’s a reciprocal relationship. I got to know if I’m going to exert, you know, to be a higher performer, I’m going to have someone recognize me for doing a great job.

John Palguta
Yeah, and I think just picking up on something David said, agencies are going to be dealing with increasing workloads in some cases with fewer resources than they had, I think in many cases, it’s simply impossible to do more with less. They’re going to have to figure out how to do something different with less, how to re-engineer the work process, how to find other ways to get the job done, and one of the few things I learned as a senior executive in government and having worked my way up is that my employees were my best resource at figuring out how to do things smarter or better.

So this whole idea of employee engagement, in part, is getting your employees engaged in helping you figure out how we get the job done, that we can’t keep doing what we’re doing – what we’ve been doing. I can’t simply ask everybody to turn the crank faster and we’re going to get there because they’re doing it as much as they can. So we’re going to have to figure out how can we do things differently, how can we reset priorities. Maybe there are some things we stop doing and if I’m smart as a government manager, I’m engaged with my employees. I’m asking them to help me find something – a solution to something that I – by myself, I simply – I’m not going to get there. I’m only going to get there if I’ve got my employees with me, they’re engaged, and they understand that we’re all in this together and we’ve got a job to get done. How do we do it differently than we did last year?

Jane Norris
So how do agency leaders, David, use these sort of guideposts that you’re both talking about to improve employee engagement?

David Dye
Sure. Well, I would like to make a distinction between leaders and then managers and supervisors. I think they both provide critical roles and opportunities to inspire and engage the workforce. Senior leaders need to create the vision, create the strategy, show how people are aligned to that mission, and there’s nothing more inspiring than knowing that what I do every day is actually contributing to the success of that agency. So I think leaders serve in that capacity. I think managers and supervisors need to provide – I call it enabling strategies for people to be successful. You know, removing barriers, giving the resources to be successful, so a lot closer, if you will, to the nature of what gets done every day. So leaders, in terms of vision and strategy, supervisors, managers, in terms of providing the resources to get the job done, and oh, by the way again, recognizing good work. I think that’s a double-winning combination.

Jane Norris
And performance management – that is definitely something that’s coming in terms of how we engage employees and compensate them. I know that we have had many other programs in the past, but it does seem to be that that’s something that government still wants to initiate. Is that all part of this, too?

John Palguta
Yes, we’ve dealt with performance management for as long as I’ve been around, which is a very long time. And it doesn’t go away. It still becomes critically important on a couple of levels. First, as David was suggesting, how do we reward our top performers, and it’s not all about the money. I mean, sometimes people just want the chance to develop and grow. They want some recognition that they’re contributing, and for that very small percentage of folks who are not carrying their weight,we’ve got to be serious about look, if there’s something that’s not working here for you, we can help you be somewhere else, but we’ve got to have a team that’s working together that we can rely upon, know that we can rely upon one another.

I think the performance management is going to be crucial and we’re going to have to look at ways to do that. It was interesting, recently I was talking to some folks over at Department of Transportation. They have a performance element in the performance appraisals for all the senior executives dealing with holding them accountable for doing specific actions to become a better place to work.

David Dye
One other thing I might add to that. Read an interesting article recently by some of my colleagues called Why Is Performance Management Broken? and the concept was we’ve tinkered with a performance appraisal situation of number rating scales and providing training for people to sort of get the ratings right, but at the end of the day what really makes performance management work is all those things outside that sort of year-end process, which is the communication between an employee and a manager, and I think that’s a lot of what we’re talking about in the employee engagement arena.

Jane Norris
So as we come to the end of the show, can you give us any insights into what you learned in the Best Places to Work in 2011?

John Palguta
Well, we learned that even though there were a lot of negative things happening in government, the employee engagement satisfaction, if you will, did not take as big a dip as folks thought it would, and 30% of the agencies actually managed to improve. So leadership continues to be key, and involving employees, is part of that leadership picture.

Jane Norris
David?

David Dye
I would say just in general, I think employees are really the best observers of what’s going on in their organizations. And it’s things like “Best Places” that tap into that mindset, and asking people about their opinions of how things are going in their workplace is an important element of collecting data, but then you got to act on the results. How you act on the results and how you communicate that back out is really the other powerful piece of this—asking your workforce and providing them feedback. And the word gets out. People like to provide their opinions.

Jane Norris
David, thank you very much, and John, appreciate both of you being on the show today. You’ve been listening to FedCentral on Federal News Radio 1500 AM with David Dye, Director, Federal Human Capital, Deloitte Consulting, LLP, and John Palguta, Vice-President for Policy at the Partnership for Public Service. Thank for joining us. We’ll see you again next time on FedCentral on Federal News Radio 1500 AM. I’m Jane Norris.

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