ARE GOVERNMENT WORKERS ENGAGED?
Posted by Tim Bryce on August 15, 2016
BRYCE ON GOVERNMENT
– And what is it costing the taxpayers?
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The Gallup organization has been monitoring worker engagement for quite some time. The purpose is to let companies know how many employees are stimulated by their work, and how many are not. Business can then use this to make changes in their management style. For example, in the United States, which is considered the most “engaged” in the world, has a rate of 31.5%. Surprisingly, Germany, which is often considered a model of productivity, enjoys only a meager 16% engagement rate. A lot of this can be attributed to the tendency to micromanage the lives of the workers as opposed to empowering them.
While Gallup’s studies have primary focused on business, on July (7th), they produced a report on the “State of Local and State Government Workers’ Engagement in the U.S.,” a first.
The report studied employee engagement for state and local governments of 43 U.S. states, and from it found:
29% – of government workers are engaged in their jobs
71% – are not.
They also reported the states where engagement levels were the highest were primarily in the South, and the lowest were in the Northeast and Midwest. Interestingly, most of the South includes “Right to Work” states, and the Northeast and Midwest are under union control.
The 29% government engagement rate is just slightly lower than the 31.5% business rate.
Engaged employees move their workplaces forward. Disengaged workers do the opposite, costing their states millions of dollars, interfering with government goals, thereby causing taxpayer dissatisfaction. The big difference is government worker disengagement costs the U.S. economy roughly half a trillion dollars a year. In a related Gallup report, “Unhappy State, Local Government Workers Cost U.S. Billions,” they reported…
“Local governments’ annual budgets from Lincoln, Nebraska, to New York City total about $2.0 trillion, while state governments annually spend an estimated $1.7 trillion. Combined, state and local governments contribute 11% to U.S. GDP. Considering the size of their workforce and budgets, disengagement is costing state and local governments, conservatively, up to $100 billion — more than the entire spending budgets of most states.”
So, what can be done to improve engagement? Normally, I would suggest minimizing micromanagement by “managing from the bottom-up.” This means training your people accordingly, articulating project assignments carefully, and empowering the workers to solve projects on their own. To do so, a good project management system is required to plan, estimate, schedule, report and control projects. This means managers should manage more and supervise less. However, in government the problem may be more deeply seeded due to the obnoxious bureaucracies involved. In other words, too much red tape can stall progress regardless of the best intentions of the workers.
Keep one thing in mind, the Gallup study only considers state and local government. Imagine what federal worker disengagement is costing the country. Kowabunga!
If desired, you can download Gallup’s complete report (click HERE).
Also published with News Talk Florida.
Keep the Faith!
Note: All trademarks both marked and unmarked belong to their respective companies.
Tim Bryce is a writer and the Managing Director of M&JB Investment Company (M&JB) of Palm Harbor, Florida and has over 30 years of experience in the management consulting field. He can be reached at timb001@phmainstreet.com
For Tim’s columns, see: timbryce.com
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Copyright © 2016 by Tim Bryce. All rights reserved.
NEXT UP: IS AMERICA ON THE BRINK OF FALLING APART? – A comparison between the 1960’s and the 2010’s.
LAST TIME: IS THE POLITICAL SYSTEM RIGGED? – What do you think?
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Tim Bryce said
A B.H. of Boulder, Colorado wrote…
“And, having been in a supervisory position over civil servants while on active duty, I can tell you that the “union” rules are exceptionally strong and discouraging to anyone trying to fire or punish a civil servant for poor performance. It literally takes YEARS of detailed record-keeping and counseling being documented in order to justify those kinds of actions – meaning, in all likelihood, if a supervisor has a problem with an employee, like as not the supervisor will move on before the employee, meaning the whole process starts all over again – because the new supervisor will come in and figure there was a “personality conflict” between the employee and last supervisor, so they’ll give the employee “another chance” and see what happens. Once you do that, the clock starts all over again.”
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William Achbach said
Not surprising at all, is it, that the numbers skew the way they do South vs. NE? Not only is there the right-to-work phenomenon in play (with accompanying absence of haranguing from Union reps to sour attitudes), but there’s also the Southern sense that state and local governments fundamentally matter more (or should) in the lives of citizens than Uncle Sugar, so many miles away.
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