From scorecards to results: Improving federal employee performance in government

Decades of initiatives to improve federal employee performance have missed the simple answer:  Listening works.

Every new Presidential Administration comes into government vowing to fix deeply broken performance management systems and culture. The Trump Administration has taken swift and decisive action to drive deep change across the Federal government by focusing on efficiency and performance. The Administration is also looking to technology innovations to leapfrog the government into a future state in which customers are served effectively, employees operate efficiently, and skilled performance is rewarded.

Drive efficiency and improve results in government with Qualtrics

Workforce challenges

The decades-long workforce challenges that put Strategic Human Capital Management onto the GAO High Risk list starting in 2001, have given the Administration a complex problem set to solve:

• Hiring policies and practices that favor people skilled at gaming the hiring system rather than doing the job they’re hired for
• A pay system that rewards longevity instead of performance combined with hiring practices that place technical experts into supervisory positions
• Inadequate preparation of supervisors for their core responsibilities building a culture of employee engagement, productivity, and efficiency. The legally-required new-supervisor training mandates coverage of topics – but with no measurable learning outcomes or minimum duration of training specified, there’s an increased risk that it is treated as a perfunctory requirement
• Lack of effective tools and resources to improve federal employee performance, with either training (routinely cut from strained budgets) or coaching (difficult to execute consistently by overworked managers who are not taught coaching skills)
• The inherent difficulty of measuring many of the outcomes government employees are responsible for delivering (Take, for example, the State Department: How do they prove the negatives of preventing conflict through diplomacy?).

Over the decades, various Administrations have made several valiant attempts to fix “the system”:  Reinventing Government, Results-Oriented Performance Culture, Results-Only Work Environment, High-Performance Government – the list goes on.

Meanwhile, the Federal government comprises a wide variety and diversity of organizations - including high performing teams we can learn from and scale.

High performing teams

The high energy teams are simply unstoppable, diving right into the most complex challenges the world is facing – from economic disruptions to political conflict – delivering significant results with minimal resources.  These teams solve problems on the fly, stare down nay-sayers to drive innovations, and deliver solutions that provide sustainable improvements for the communities the government serves.  And these teams have fun.

So what is the difference between high performing teams and the less effective pockets of government?

Employee engagement drives performance

It is the day-in, day-out engagement within government teams and with their leaders that keep them at peak performance.

Qualtrics XM Institute global research demonstrates again and again that organizational performance requires effective employee experience management. Businesses thriving in an increasingly competitive and complex market have leveraged Qualtrics to drive success even through times of turbulence.

Examples

Zillow

When Zillow acquired a major competitor, its workforce quadrupled overnight. Partnering with Qualtrics, Zillow was able to measure all employees’ experiences across the entire lifecycle – from hiring to exit – and drive improvements to build a cohesive and performance-focused organization.

Chipotle

Similarly, Chipotle has created an always-on Voice of the Employee Program that feeds actionable insights to managers in real-time. Role based dashboards empower managers to identify the experience gaps that impede performance – like process inefficiencies, or inadequate tools – and close the gaps themselves.

Volkswagen

And with Qualtrics, Volkswagen has pinpointed the employee experiences that impede customer outcomes. By addressing employee experience needs, Volkswagen has improved customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Listen, understand, act

What does this look like in practice – and how can governments embed and scale it in their institutions?  Effective federal employee performance management happens through three simple practices, which Qualtrics technology innovations embed into organizations’ everyday operating rhythms:

1. Listen to what they’re experiencing

When employees face challenges getting their jobs done, they will still stay engaged if they see the organization taking visible and meaningful action to improve their work environment. Successful organizations achieve this by listening empathically to the challenges employees are encountering in their work. Listening takes many forms – formal meetings, informal chats, observations in the work environment, surveying – but regardless of channel, it is the empathy leaders demonstrate through the act of listening that make employees willing to communicate honestly about the problems that hinder performance.

Today, it’s easier than ever before to listen to employees – even in a fully digitized environment. Leaders can listen through periodic surveys, topic-specific pulses, and intercepts embedded in the tools employees use every day. Employees can use a mobile device to take a quick video explaining what’s happening to them, and upload it for immediate feed into the experience data set. So when an employee encounters an issue – or just wants to communicate on the fly – they can provide that feedback quickly and safely.

2. Understand what needs to change

Listening with empathy strengthens the relationship between employee and manager. But getting problems solved is equally important. Leaders can’t begin to solve problems without first achieving an objective and comprehensive understanding of the root causes. And that understanding is buried in all the rich communication employees provide through the various channels they use to communicate.

AI-powered analysis of unstructured, qualitative data can now surface insights in near real-time. Themes, trends, and correlations are fed to leaders in visualized dashboards that help them uncover root causes.  Leaders can dive deeper into the data and drill down into specific areas, view the raw inputs (while protecting employee anonymity), and understand what is impeding – or promoting–- high performance.

3. Act quickly - and visibly

The most important step in this approach to federal performance management is taking action on employee feedback. If an employee takes the time to express themselves, and if they know their leader now has the data needed to understand what’s happening, they will expect some kind of action to be taken. If employees can’t see that action, they’ll stop talking and disengage, leading to deteriorating performance.

In platforms like Qualtrics, action is fast and visible. Automated workflows can route a complaint to the team responsible for resolving it - think IT or HR. Closed-loop feedback can assure the employee that their issue is being worked on. Managers can use generative AI tools to get immediate suggestions for prioritized actions based on engagement survey results. They can engage their employees in collaborative action planning, giving employees the opportunity to anonymously suggest ideas and upvote the ones that resonate. These action plans can then be published and monitored by organizational leadership to hold managers accountable for the follow-through that will drive improved performance.

The lesson of the past decades of administration performance initiatives is this: The problem of human performance is - a human problem. And human problems can’t be fixed with structural solutions alone. Creating high performing organizations takes the everyday practice of listening, understanding, and acting on the needs of employees who want to get the job done. A new administration should focus on building that capability in every government organization - and reap the rewards of improved results for the communities the government serves.