Best Places to Work Guide

Chapter One: Understanding Your Data and Communication

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The 2009 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings have shown that any agency can improve its employee satisfaction—in fact, 71 percent of federal organizations increased their scores since 2007. Even top-ranked agencies can improve—both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Government Accountability Office improved their scores, even though they already held the number one and number two spots, respectively.

At the other end of the spectrum, the three lowest-ranked agencies in 2007—the Departments of Education and Homeland Security and the Small Business Administration—are among the top four most-improved large agencies. SBA improved its index score by 30 percent and jumped four spots in the rankings to become this year’s top riser.

After hearing these success stories and viewing the 2009 Best Places to Work rankings for your own agency or subcomponent, you may be inspired and motivated to enhance the workplace environment for your employees. However, you may still have some questions about how to understand and use the Best Places to Work data and how to better address employee satisfaction and commitment in your organization.

This first chapter of the Best Places to Work guide will walk you through three initial steps to improve the workplace environment for your employees:

1. Gather your Best Places to Work data and understand how each dataset can advance your objectives;
2. Develop a strategic approach to improve employee satisfaction; and
3. Identify and communicate with key stakeholders to garner buy-in for improvement efforts across your agency or subcomponent.

Use the Data Checklist and Stakeholder Engagement Plan tools in the Action Toolkit at the end of this chapter to keep track of your data and to plan your stakeholder outreach strategy. For more information on specific topics, you can refer to the additional resources listed in the Annotated Bibliography.

Chapter Two: Action Planning

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By now, you have likely gathered and organized your Best Places to Work in the Federal Government data sets, identified your top drivers of employee satisfaction and either started the improvement initiative yourself or created action teams to begin the process. Senior leadership is probably eager for rapid changes to achieve better employee satisfaction and a more committed, engaged workforce.

Your agency or subcomponent can take a number of approaches to improve employee satisfaction, depending on: issues the data identify that you should address, your organizational mission and culture and available time and resources. Some organizations select interested and talented individuals with varied experiences to serve on action planning teams, while others choose to appoint one person to gather input and develop recommendations. This chapter presents our recommended approach to Best Places to Work action planning. Many agencies have successfully employed these strategies in the past. While we recommend that a team consist of four to eight members, this process can be adapted to a team of any size.

This second chapter of the Best Places to Work guide will help you:

1. Initiate—finalize goals, confirm deliverables, determine limits and define metrics for success;
2. Plan—identify key phases; and
3. Execute, Monitor and Control—complete the work activities in each key phase and stay on track.

Use the Charter and Plan templates in the Action Toolkit at the end of this chapter to create the core reference documents for your plan. These resources will help you create a series of informed, prioritized recommendations you can then use to fill in the Action Plan Worksheet in the Hay Group Excel Tool. For more ideas and inspiration, refer to the additional resources in the Annotated Bibliography.

Chapter Three: Sustaining and Building on Results

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Congratulations! So far, you have likely accomplished a great deal toward your mission to improve employee satisfaction in a way that also improves organizational effectiveness at your agency. You have analyzed your data, developed a strategic approach and engaged key stakeholders to garner buy-in for action. You have also developed an action plan (or plans), created a set of informed recommendations and implemented some, if not all of those solutions.

Sustaining higher levels of employee satisfaction at your agency takes time. It requires a long-term commitment, especially from leadership. It takes continuous effort to maintain positive changes, not just a one-time push—think of it as ongoing “diet and exercise” for your agency as opposed to a one-week fast. Don’t be discouraged if it takes longer than expected to see desired results; external events and setbacks can happen, but it’s up to you to be persistent in your efforts.

Long-term results often require cultural shifts to support changes in the workplace. Employees at all levels in your agency may need some time to adjust to change, and some may even resist. But staying steady is really getting left back. Government-wide employee satisfaction ratings have continued to rise since 2003, so agencies must change and improve to keep up with the average. As you help employees understand how new agency values translate into action and that higher levels of employee satisfaction relate to better agency outcomes, your agency can institutionalize changes and help turn “new” into “normal” to sustain improvements over time.

Chapter Three: Sustaining and Building on Results will help you incorporate your changes into the agency’s culture and mission to enhance efforts to improve the workplace environment for your employees over the long term. This third chapter will help you:

1. Document improvements and lessons learned;
2. Institutionalize changes from “new” to “normal”; and
3. Plan next steps.

 

The Best Places to Work guide was developed by the Partnership for Public Service with generous support from TMP Government.

 

© 2009 Partnership for Public Service