GUEST COLUMN.
“HAPPY EMPLOYEES: HAPPY RESIDENTS”
By Bob Lavigna, Senior Fellow – Public Sector, UKG
I’ve written and spoken frequently about why it’s important for human resources departments in government to measure their effectiveness. Too often, leaders want HR to just keep them and their organizations out of trouble. Or as an HR director confessed to me, her city manager told her that HR’s job was “to make no waves.” Another director told me his department’s goal is “to stay under the radar.”
These perspectives undervalue and undermine HR’s work and contributions.
Every day, millions of public servants at all levels of government deliver essential services to 340 million people across our nation. I can’t think of any other sector that can make that claim – or has that responsibility.
To deliver, government organizations depend on HR to help recruit and retain a talented, committed, and stable workforce. As a result, HR has developed and reports on performance metrics such as vacancy rates, time to hire, quality of hires, turnover, number of employees trained, and so on.
While these are useful indicators, I’ve often thought that there is a data gap – how does HR affect outcomes in government that genuinely matter to the people it serves?
Research on the private sector has documented the link between effective HR practices and financial outcomes such as profit, market value, and cash flow. Moreover, research on this sector has revealed that a positive employee experience correlates with a positive customer experience (and therefore with financial outcomes).
However, the relationship between HR and outcomes is more difficult to document in the public sector, which does not have the same financial measures, and where it can also be hard to assess customer satisfaction.
To fill this data gap, UKG conducted research with the journalist/research team of Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene; and Polco, a community engagement and data insights platform that administers the National Community Survey (NCS) to assess residents’ satisfaction with government services.
Our goal was to analyze the relationship, if any, between effective HR practices in local government and resident satisfaction with their local government and their quality of life in the community.
The results
We were gratified (and to be candid, relieved) to find a statistically significant connection between effective HR practices in local government and resident satisfaction with government services and the quality of life in their communities.
We especially like the way one HR director succinctly summarized our results: “Happy employees, happy residents.”
As the table below shows, for the five specific HR practice areas listed on the left, we found statistically significant correlations with the four outcome measures across the top. These are the four summary questions the Polco survey asks residents. While all the relationships with check marks are statistically significant, the darker the color, the more significant.
The effective practices
We then drilled down on the statistics to understand what the high-performing HR departments in our sample are doing to excel in each of the five areas linked to resident satisfaction. Barrett and Greene interviewed the HR directors of the 10 highest-scoring departments. These practices, described in our white paper, “Building Government from Within: Workforce Excellence and Resident Satisfaction,” are summarized as follows:
Performance management practices that create ongoing communication between the manager/supervisor and employee to accomplish a few clear goals linked to the organization’s strategic objectives. Plus, practices that recognize superior performance and deal with poor performance
.
HR departments that are staffed with qualified professionals with the right motivation, attitude, skills, education, and experience.
Employee well-being programs that prioritize mental health, physical wellness, financial literacy, work-life balance, and manageable workloads that prevent burnout. Plus, positive manager-employee relationships that ensure employees can bring their best selves to work.
Aggressive recruiting and positive branding, streamlined hiring, time-to-hire data, technology that includes mobile-friendly job applications, and communication with job seekers throughout the process.
Compensation and benefits practices that include conducting regular market surveys, assessing pay equity, communicating the value of total compensation, adjusting structures to avoid pay compression, streamlining job classifications, and providing flexible leave.
In each of these five key HR areas, we provide recommendations based on these effective practices.
Why this research matters
Government HR leaders face daunting challenges that are only accelerating. Though HR departments have increasingly attempted to evolve from transactional to strategic, the next phase is to become – and be seen as – truly transformational.
Too often, however, as one HR director put it, “HR is mostly thought of a ‘back office’ operation and when it gets public attention, it’s mostly when there’s a bad outcome.”
That’s why we hope this research provides HR departments with a greater sense of value and achievement. When public sector organizations develop effective human resource practices, the payoff is a heightened sense of resident confidence in government and quality of life. As one HR director said, “The HR team is all about service and we provide that service to the employees, so they feel cared for, and it flows from them to the residents.”
In other words, people are an asset to be invested in, not a cost to be controlled or reduced. HR departments can use our results as solid evidence to demonstrate to elected officials who control their budgets that focusing on the workforce can have a real payoff, including in voters’ positive views of their local government. And that, to put it bluntly, translates into votes.
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