Effective way for dealing with disgruntled employees

Purujith Gautam

Government solution expert at QuestionPro. Passionate about innovation and public sector insight collection.

The days of the quarterly survey are dead. Across the private sector, smart agencies are shifting away from their disinterested and callous employee engagement systems and are seeking new ways to manage unhappy employees, moving to employee analytics tools that are increasingly active, inclusive, and frequent. The trend, however, is clearly slow to catch on in the federal government. 

Our federal employees are often neglected, unsatisfied with their jobs, unable to efficiently report to their supervisors, and are often times, even disappointed about the mission of their agency. The dissatisfaction is very dangerous, as federal employees are the engine behind the services being provided across the nation, therefore it is important to manage unhappy employees well to mitigate this circumstance. 

The 2015 OPM Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, known as FEVS for short, reports a score of 64% on the employee engagement index. While this is an improvement from some years with far lower rates, there is still an immense amount of untapped potential in the workspace.

One would expect that the increasing adoption of innovative technologies to improve employee satisfaction in the private sector would be reflected in the public sector as well, but this not the case. The public sector can still make some big and smart technical changes to manage unhappy employees better!

What are our federal government agencies doing wrong here, and what can be done better? 

The critical issue

It all starts with the frequency with which you listen. Say you have a federal employee named Stacy who joins in January. Now, Stacy is extremely dissatisfied with her job right from the beginning, maybe because her tasks are mismatched with  her strengths, or maybe her supervisor is not listening to her insights. Dissatisfaction will always exist in these forms, but there is the critical issue that often goes unnoticed.

Neither her supervisors nor the senior management will even know that Stacy is dissatisfied and therefore less efficient in her job until they conduct the quarterly or annual review. 

Stacy is detached from the mission of the agency, unsatisfied with her job, and is more of a source of inefficiency in the agency. 

Now imagine this…there are a THOUSAND (if not more) Stacys in your federal organization. 

What is the solution? How should they manage unhappy employees?

Employee disengagement is a universal problem to which QuestionPro has developed a solution  – Employee Engagement Software to supercharge your workforce. QuestionPro Workforce helps government agencies tap into their often unharnessed potential. Instead of the annual or even quarterly reviews, you can now run weekly pulse surveys, conduct far more efficient 360 reviews, and even map the Organizational Health and Genome of your federal agency. 

Ask your federal employees, just one question, once a week, that they can answer on their cell phones or computers when they get into work on a Monday. You are no longer making your federal employees complete a daunting 50 question quarterly survey but are frequently keeping track of your agency’s pulse, thereby enabling yourself to recapture any lost efficiency.

So there it is, a simple solution, to change that shaky and frankly disappointing 64% employee satisfaction FEVS score, to a much higher percentage. Make federal employees more satisfied, listen to their voices, unlock their talent,and improve the services provided to the nation. 

Don’t let your Stacys go unnoticed.

Start a weekly pulse now with QuestionPro Workforce.