Employee Engagement and a Government Shutdown
I rarely wade into the world of politics in this forum, but today’s an exception. Here we go…
Employers around the world have been installing programs and plans to increase employee engagement for years. An ongoing set of studies by Gallup shows clearly that an engaged employee population outperforms their disengaged peers across a host of key performance indicators (KPIs). In their Q12 employee engagement assessment, researchers compare top quartile (engaged teams) and bottom quartile (disengaged teams) across myriad countries, industries, and organizations on performance metrics such as productivity, profitability, absenteeism, turnover, and quality. In their latest version of the Q12, Gallup found that the top quartile outperformed the bottom quartile by:
81% in absenteeism,
23% in profitability,
18% in productivity,
41% in quality, and
18% in employee turnover (and that’s for company’s that identify as having high-turnover characteristics).
Clearly engagement matters in the private sector and it’s not farfetched to make the assumption that these results would translate to institutions and government entities.
So now let’s assume you’re a member of the US Congress. One of your most important jobs is to fund the government. Since a large portion of government discretionary spending goes to support roughly 4 million federal employees, votes cast to fund or not fund the government will have real, meaningful impacts on the lives of the civilians and military personnel who work to support and protect us every day. These are real people who live and work in our communities. They have homes, kids, and car payments.
I know from personal experience as a leader that teams who believe their jobs are at risk or who’s pay is uncertain do not perform at their peak abilities. The constant threat of being let go or of not getting paid looms over the team like a dark gray cloud. When the rumors swirl that x team is going to be downsized or y operating unit is going to be shut down, productivity grinds to a crawl.
So what’s the point? As private citizens, we love to grouse about government productivity, or the lack thereof. Behind all this grousing is a desire to have more productive government entities—to have our tax dollars go further. How can we do that? Focus on engagement. Who needs to focus on engagement? The managers and leaders of government agencies and their bosses. Who’s the ultimate boss? It’s Congress—they hold the purse strings.
So if you’re a member of Congress who thinks it’s a good idea to score political points by shutting down the government, think again. All a government shutdown will produce is more self-inflicted wounds. One of those wounds shows up in the form of a less-engaged federal workforce and we all pay for a less-engaged federal workforce in the form of lower productivity.
Collectively, Congress is the employer of the largest workforce in the US. It’s time the nation’s largest employer starts thinking more carefully about the engagement of its teams and its individual team members.
