Government psychologists have written a paper that says the best way to keep federal employees engaged in their work is to give them “feedback,” and make sure they have the right “work-life balance.”
Those are the findings of Andrea Zappone and Matthew Sigafoose, who are “personnel research psychologists” at the Office of Personnel Management. The pair wrote a paper called “Engaging the Federal Workforce: How to Do It & Prove It,” and on Tuesday, they invited federal agencies to read it online.
The paper can only be accessed by federal workers, but the psychologists shared some of their findings in a blog post.
According to that post, “employee engagement” is defined in the paper as “the employee’s sense of purpose that is evident in their display of dedication, persistence, and effort in their work or overall attachment to their organization and its mission.”
Several factors, or “drivers,” contribute to a federal worker’s “sense of purpose,” the paper said. Those drivers include performance feedback, collaborative management and “support for merit system principles.”
Other drivers include training and development opportunities, and “work-life balance.” Fostering all of these drivers can help develop a federal workforce that is “more innovative, productive, committed, satisfied, and more likely to remain at their job,” the blog said.
The blog also noted that the “employee engagement index” throughout the federal government improved in 2015 for the first time in three years. According to UnlockTalent.gov, the governmentwide engagement score was 64 percent in 2015, up 1 percent from the year before.
The best engagement scores were at the Federal Trade Commission, NASA, and the Office of Management and Budget, while the bottom three agencies were the Small Business Administration, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the Department of Homeland Security.
But the OPM psychologists said there’s still more work to do to make sure federal workers are happy and engaged in their jobs.
“In releasing this white paper, we hope that OPM’s new federal definition and model will serve as a foundation for capturing and sharing best practices to drive and sustain future employee engagement efforts,” they said.
