HR Specialist: Compensation & Benefits

In-depth strategic advice for designing, developing and maintaining compensation and benefit programs that attract and retain talent and make our readers’ organizations the employer of choice.  HR Specialist: Compensation and Benefits guides professionals through their often-confusing and shifting legal and regulatory responsibilities while contributing to – rather than detracting from – the organization’s financial goals.  Learn more about HR Specialist: Compensation and Benefits and the six free reports you'll get when you subscribe...

Set aside any notions you might have that the federal bureaucracy is inherently dysfunctional. In fact, Uncle Sam’s best agencies have a thing or two to teach private-sector employers.

The federal agencies that rank highest on the 2009 list of “The Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” have three things in common:

1. Their employees respect the agencies’ leaders. In particular, they rate their own supervisors and team leaders highly.

2. Managers freely share information with employees. Staffers believe they have enough info to do their jobs well and to know what’s going on in their organizations.

3. The work that employees do matches the agencies’ missions.

Here are eight lessons employers can learn from the biennial agency-by-agency ranking of federal employers by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and American University’s Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation.

1. Push teamwork. One thing federal employees love about their jobs that your employees might not: The people they work with cooperate to get the job done. “This is a strength of government,” says Bob Lavigna, vice president of research for Partnership for Public Service. “It may be the nature of the work that the government performs: public service.” Corporate employees, he supposes, are more likely to compete with each other for money and position.

Lesson learned: Tie rewards to teamwork rather than individual accomplishment.

2. Never stop training. Federal employees are more likely than private-sector workers to say their employers give them opportunities to improve their job skills.

Lesson learned: During a recession, the training budget is often first on the chopping block. If you cut training, you’re likely to reduce employee satisfaction.

3. Reveal your reasoning. The feds do a good job of letting employees know how their jobs help fulfill the mission of their agencies. “There’s a line of sight between what the employee does and what the organization does,” says Lavigna. “It’s clear the ways the government affects our lives: the food we eat, the air we breathe, the roads we travel on, and on and on.”

Lesson learned: That link, says Lavigna, is “critical to drive high levels of satisfaction.”

4. Open up. Here’s where the feds got dinged—and that offers lessons, too. A lack of information from management hurt the rankings of many federal agencies. In fact, the most widespread gripe of federal employees is that their leaders do a lousy job of passing information down the chain of command. The private sector outperforms the feds by nearly 18 percentage points when it comes to employee satisfaction with communication from the brass.

Lesson learned: Communication helps employees perform better and feel more a part of the organization, which breeds loyalty.

5. Nurture tomorrow’s leaders. If leadership development and succession planning have fallen by the wayside at your organization because of the recession, find a way to bring them back to life. The primary driver of job satisfaction among federal employees is effective leadership. Federal employers are respected for promoting from within and retaining employees for the long haul.

Lesson learned: Prepare a competent next generation of leaders to step in when the current crop retires.

6. Embrace flexibility. Work/life balance—defined not so much by child care centers or on-site gyms as by managers who acknowledge that employees have outside lives and interests—is a key driver of satisfaction, especially among young employees.

Lesson learned: Workers want to know that their employers are making an effort to provide them with work/life balance—even if they’re too busy to partake of the benefits.

7. Don’t stand still. Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the General Accounting Office, which ranked first and second, respectively, on the “best” list in 2007 and again in 2009, substantially improved their scores this year. But if the NRC had been content to simply maintain its 2007 score, it would have lost the top spot.

Lesson learned: Running in place can cause an organization to fall behind when it comes to employee satisfaction and commitment.

8. Redefine “employee satisfaction.” The authors of the federal “best” list don’t define it as “happy employees” or “making the workplace fun,” although both are valuable.

Instead, Lavigna explains, “It’s about making sure that people feel they are doing important and satisfying work. It’s about putting employees in the best possible position to make a difference.”

Lesson learned: Study your exit interview data to determine why employees are leaving. Employee satisfaction, notes Lavigna, is linked to an employee’s intention to stay with the organization.