“We’d love to have this workforce information, but our attorneys say it would create liability for us.”
And my favorite:
“I know my employees are pissed off — I don’t have to survey them to find out.”
These are examples of public-sector organizations that are reluctant to collect, share or use data to understand their workforce and workplace. As a result, they don’t have critical information needed to ensure they can attract and retain talent.
I get it. In the fishbowl political environment of government, it’s risky to assemble information that can become public. No one likes bad news, especially if it can hurt or even end careers.
As a former public-sector leader myself, I’ve faced this conundrum. We need data but data can be damaging. Even more scary, the data may suggest we need to change how we behave as leaders.
When we’ve conducted employee surveys in organizations I’ve led, it was gratifying to learn that so many of our employees felt good about aspects of their work experience. Nevertheless, there were aspects they wanted us — or me as the leader — to improve. This was a painful but powerful growth opportunity for these organizations. And for me.
This experience taught me an important lesson: It’s better to know than not to know. The work of government is too important for public-sector organizations to guess about the health of their workforces.
This is especially true given the continued struggle to compete for talent. Month after month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a gap between the numbers of vacancies and hires in government. In May, for example, there were 615,000 vacancies in state and local government but only 164,000 hires. This 3.75 ratio of vacancies to hires is almost three times as high as in the private sector. As one government HR director told me, “We’re all feeling the pain.”
What kind of data will help leaders know whether their organization is an employer of choice? Here are some examples:
• Many public-sector organizations have learned through employee surveys that their employees do not feel valued. To respond, these organizations took steps that included new recognition programs and training managers and supervisors on why and how to recognize employee contributions.
• A state corrections department that analyzed overtime realized that excessive overtime was blowing up the department’s budget, driving turnover and creating risk. Overtime costs were 18 percent over budget and OT hours were distributed inequitably. One correctional officer had worked 76 straight days. Until the department analyzed the data, these overtime costs and risks went unnoticed. The department managed overtime better, cutting overtime costs, reducing staff burnout and improving officer safety.
• A county analyzed time to hire and realized it took an average of 130 days to hire a new employee. HR then conducted a Lean Six Sigma analysis and reduced hiring time to 50 days.
• A large employer analyzed compensation data and learned that employees working in the same jobs performing at similar levels were being paid at different rates. Based on this analysis, the organization eliminated these inequities.
• When I was assistant vice chancellor for human resources at the main campus of the University of Wisconsin, employees told us through our employee survey that they wanted the university to communicate better. One of our responses was to conduct quarterly HR forums. We did one forum during the day and one from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. for our second- and third-shift employees. These “midnight sessions” were better attended than the day sessions. We convinced the university chancellor to attend a session. One employee described that appearance as “historic,” the first time most of them had ever seen a chancellor in person.
These examples underscore what I heard a government HR leader say recently: “What isn’t measured doesn’t matter.” Here are some other metrics that can reveal whether the organization is — or isn’t — an employer of choice:
First, in recruiting and hiring, applicant flow data is crucial. That is, which applicants are staying in or abandoning the hiring process, perhaps because it is taking too long? Is the organization losing the best-qualified, including those candidates who could contribute to diversity?
I’m often asked what a “good” turnover rate is. The answer depends on who is leaving — and why. What may look like low turnover can mask real retention issues. Is the organization losing its best performers, recent hires, employees in mission-critical jobs or disproportionately in certain work units or demographic groups? It’s critical to be able to drill down on turnover data.
And what about diversity? Has the organization achieved it, including at leadership levels? Despite the current controversy over diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, there is a well-established business case for DEI: Diverse and inclusive organizations outperform the competition and are better able to attract talent.
Other important hiring metrics include percent of job offers accepted, candidate evaluations of their hiring experiences (both from those who were hired and those who weren’t), return on investment from recruiting sources (that is, which ones deliver the best candidates), cost per hire, hiring managers’ satisfaction with the quality of candidates and hires, new hires’ evaluations of their onboarding experiences, and the performance of new hires as assessed by performance evaluations and supervisors.
Organizations across all sectors are coming to understand the power of workforce data. When LinkedIn identified the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. last year, it found that the second-fastest-growing title was “human resources analytics manager.” If your organization is not focusing on collecting and analyzing data to help you be an employer of choice, rest assured that the competition is.
It can take courage for leaders to commit to collecting, analyzing and acting on workforce data. But without data, it’s just a guess whether the organization is an employer of choice. The stakes for government — and indeed for the American public — are too high for guesswork.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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