Motivating a leaner, greener workforce

hat makes people exert their best efforts? As working people have advanced from the status of animated tools in the scientific management era of 100 years ago to the heady ranks of associates and partners in today's enterprises, that question has remained vital to those who pay them in settings ranging from factory floors to headquarters offices. For federal agencies, it looms again with special urgency as the aftereffects of a decade of downsizing come into focus.

The private sector, which downsized dramatically a decade before the government did, is by all accepted economic and financial measures the fittest and most productive it has ever been. The human measures, less universally accepted and far less systematic, yield a less triumphant picture. An American Management Association survey of more than 1,000 companies in the early 1990s found lower morale in surviving employees, who often feared that they would be the next to go in another round of layoffs. A more recent British study, for instance, found that survivors of downsizing were twice as likely as members of a stable employee population to take sick leave and were five times as likely to suffer back and muscle pain.

A frequent theme in human resources literature is the altered "employment contract," which replaced the employer-for-a-lifetime model with the more modest expectation that an employer merely provides workers the opportunities to develop job skills for multi-employer careers. One consequence is the common employee practice of using official time to check job openings, write and file résumés, take career skills courses and receive career counseling.

The leaner government has made its contribution to the unprecedented turnaround of federal finances from chronic deficits to tempting surpluses. But does the surviving workforce possess the skills and temperament necessary to carry out its missions? Clearly, a politically driven downsizing, accomplished with much buying out of senior talent to minimize layoffs, leaves significant skill imbalances and a loss of institutional memory that may take years to redress. Although the methods for identifying, recruiting and developing necessary competencies are fairly well established, how to deal with insecurities and battered psyches is far less understood.

The absence of surefire formulas for motivating workers is not the result of a dearth of research. Captains of industry and leaders of public enterprises have been abundantly supplied with suggestions from behavioral science research experts at least since the fabled Hawthorne, Ill., Western Electric experiments of the 1920s and 1930s. Those much-studied lighting experiments surprised many by showing that workers were more positively affected by management attention to their welfare than by the quality of lighting in their work areas.

Another classic theory, Abraham H. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, helped managers understand when to address employee survival concerns in times of real or anticipated cutbacks, and when to deal with fuller career aspirations in more secure times. A parade of scholars beginning with Douglas McGregor propounded theories about eliciting better performance by trusting, developing the potential of, and empowering workers. On a more popular level, management guru Tom Peters and others pointed the way to excellence by touting the methods of the most consistently successful organizations.

Even more directly relevant to government executives and managers are surveys of the federal workforce. The Merit Systems Protection Board is now completing its triennial Merit Principles Survey, in which it asks nearly 20,000 employees their views of their work and work environment. Results are to be released sometime next year. Past MSPB reports have shed light on sources of dissatisfaction and on the credibility of management initiatives and actions, suggesting the need for more frequent communications and clearer explanations of why actions are taken. The National Partnership for Reinventing Government found in a 1999 survey that job satisfaction is higher in agencies that emphasize reinvention activities.

The National Academy of Public Administration's Center for Human Resources Management has dealt extensively with both positive incentives and the treatment of poor performers. NAPA reports showed that burdensome paperwork discouraged supervisors from proposing employee awards and recipients' enthusiasm waned after long waits. So, the center urged the adoption of simplified, electronic-based processes. A number of agencies do exactly that, with the Commerce Department enabling managers to produce almost instant results for awards up to $1,000. At the other end of the performance spectrum, NAPA recommended alternative discipline programs, featuring efforts to reach agreement between employee and supervisor on a course of improvement with penalties held in abeyance or subsequently canceled.

Although studies have limitations, and often endorse dubious panaceas and passing fads, much of the information they contain can be helpful. Forty years after McGregor's research documented the fact, workers-especially those with alternative employment options-still respond better when they are well informed and are trusted, challenged and involved in work-related decisions. The past decade has produced specific lessons about what makes teams succeed or fail, and learning techniques and technologies constantly improve. The problem, especially for many downsizing survivors in management and in human resources offices, is keeping up with this information and finding ways to apply what may be useful to situations involving highly unpredictable human beings.

Some agencies are banding together to tap into this information base and jointly consider its applications. NAPA's Center for HRM, with the support of a consortium of more than 50 agencies, is establishing a system to enable members to access HR knowledge and experience in a timely fashion through expanded Web sites and a computer-assisted facility, which will provide an interactive computer link for sharing and critiquing ideas and, consequently, more rapid decision-making. More information is available at www.hrm.napawash.org. That sounds like an ideal way to find lots of valuable information, not the least of which is how to motivate employees.

David Hornestay, a Washington-area consultant, served in government for more than 30 years, primarily in human resources and institutional management.