By Steve Kelman
I recently attended the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, the association of professors (mostly at business schools) who study organizations. I heard an interesting paper which, although the data comes from the UK national government, is quite relevant to people thinking about how US federal employees will deal with the looming tight budget environment in government.
The authors – Tina Kiefer and Jean Hartley of the Warwick Business School, Neal Conway of Birkbeck College, and Rob Briner of the University of Bath –conducted a survey of various elements of job satisfaction, employee engagement, and how oriented the employee is to providing good service. By coincidence, in the middle of conducting the survey the new British Conservative government announced budget cuts averaging 25 percent over four years. (Remember that in Britain’s parliamentary government, when the Prime Minister announces a policy like this, it is pretty much automatically passed by the majority in Parliament, which is always the same political party or coalition as the Prime Minister.) This coincidence about the announcement allowed them to compare the attitudes of respondents who answered the survey before the budget cut announcements and afterwards, which is neat. With the announcement, they decided also to conduct a follow-up survey 6 months later asking many of the same questions, allowing some comparisons after the budget cut announcements had sunk in and begun to be implemented.
Some of the findings in the study will hardly come as a surprise to federal employees or managers, but one particular revelation might. And it has practical implications for managing in tough budget times.
The employees who answered the survey after the government announcement showed lower job satisfaction than those answering before the announcement (though there were no differences in engagement or service delivery attitudes.)
What was especially interesting in the paper, though, was another set of questions that asked respondents, both in the original survey and six months later, about the presence at their workplace of various kinds of change initiatives. In categorizing the 25-odd change initiatives they asked about, the authors distinguish between efficiency-related changes (which they define as those “with a main focus on reducing costs or restructuring processes”) and innovation-related changes (which they define as those “introducing new practices or processes”). They then compared the change in the presence of these change initiatives over the six-month period with changes in employee attitudes over the same time. They found that when efficiency-type changes went up over the period, employee job satisfaction, employee engagement and service delivery attitudes all declined. A closer look suggests that this was not so surprising, because most of the reported changes characterized as “efficiency” changes involved increases in voluntary or compulsory staff cutbacks and service delivery cutbacks.
However, the authors also found that increases in innovation-related changes were accompanied by increases over the six-month period in job satisfaction and employee engagement (though not in service delivery attitudes). This despite the general negative climate the budget cuts created.
This is a fascinating research finding and suggests a path forward for federal managers during a period of tight budgets. I would add that the innovation-related changes government organizations can carry out may also decrease costs and thus improve efficiency (bang for the budgetary buck) – indeed, one criticism I have of the paper is the use of the phrase “efficiency changes” to describe what in fact is just simple cost cutting without any real changes at all, such as getting rid of staff or cutting back services. The real distinction should not be between “efficiency” and “innovation” but between changes that actually seek to help government work better and cost less on the one hand, and the simple meat cleaver of staff or service cutbacks on the other.
Posted on Aug 23, 2012 at 12:09 PM1 comments
As regular readers of this blog know, one topic that I frequently teach about is the proliferation of rules in government organizations. It was my view while working on contracting issues while in government – and it is my view as a scholar and teacher about management – that, while rules often serve valuable functions in organizations, government organizations are frequently too rule-bound, creating problems both for customer satisfaction and for performance.
In class, I often discuss what features of a government environment – in particular media and political scrutiny that put more emphasis on avoiding scandal than on achieving great success – tend to make government more rule-bound than private companies. In executive education, managers frequently discuss ways to reduce the negative effect of rules, such as being aggressive about using exception authorities when the rule doesn’t fit.
But I also always teach that many of the problems we see in managing government organizations often exist in the private sector as well, so we in government should not flagellate ourselves too much.
I have recently experienced a dramatic example of the truth of this observation as a customer of Sovereign Bank. It would give the worst of government bureaucracy and inflexibility a run for its money.
I have kept most of my money-market cash and certificates of deposit in the Harvard Square branch of Sovereign Bank for a while. Last year, the bank manager suggested I start using Sovereign for my checking, and for a number of reasons, I was tempted by his suggestion. However, I did have a worry, which was that I wanted funds to be transferred directly from my money market account to any new checking account whenever money was needed to cover a check, and I was concerned that regulations limited the number of withdrawals I could make each month. However, the manager assured me this would not create a problem, so I proceeded to spend a fair amount of time transferring a large number of automatic payments (e.g. credit card and utility bills) to the new checking account.
Soon the previous Harvard Square manager left, and soon I began receiving notices that I had made too many withdrawals a month from my money market fund, and that this wasn’t allowed. I explained to the new manager what I had been told and the amount of time I had spent transferring automatic payments out of the account (he already knew I was quite a good customer). I suggested the following solution: I would transfer a sum from money market into checking at the beginning of each month that would pay most or all of my checks, and they would give my checking account the same rate of interest as the money market, so I could just leave funds lying there for a while.
Some time later the manager got back to me and said my request had been turned down by a regional manager – Sovereign’s rule was not to offer interest on checking accounts.
I said to the branch manager to ask the regional manager to go up further in the bank to the level of somebody authorized to make an exception to the rule. The rule is not a law of nature or a government regulation. Somewhere within Sovereign Bank there was somebody authorized to make an exception. If it had to go to the CEO, take it there, I added -- somewhat rhetorically.
Well, I’ve now heard back from the regional manager. Sovereign has no interest-paying checking account “product,” he told me, so my request couldn’t be granted, no matter how good a customer I was. Yes, I understood they had no such “product,” that was why I was asking them to make an exception to their rule; if they had an interest-bearing “product,” there would be no need to make an exception. We went back and forth with him repeating “no product” in a way reminding one of the worst stereotype of an unresponsive bureaucrat.
I finally said that if he could not authorize an exception to their rule about no interest, I was asking him to take the decision up to a higher level of Sovereign Bank, where somebody was authorized to make an exception. He was authorized to make an exception, he said, but he chose not to do so. Why did he choose not to do so, I asked? Because Sovereign Bank had no interest-bearing “product.”
Ugh, he can’t make an exception to the rule because doing so would violate the rule! I blurted out, “I understand! That’s why I am asking for an exception to your rule.”
Quickly I realized we were in a do-loop; the regional manager started repeating something about wanting to send me a communication that put our conversation in writing, so he could “memorialize” that we had had a conversation, again a behavior more bureaucratic than most government bureaucrats.
This actually reminded me of an experience I once had while in government. I was chairing a meeting of the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) Council that was discussing rewriting Part 15 of the regulation. As I led a discussion of a certain possible change, I could watch a particularly conservative Defense Department staffer becoming more and more agitated, redder and redder in the face, until finally he blurted out, “You can’t make that change! It’s contrary to the FAR!” As calmly as I could, I responded: “What we are doing now is rewriting the FAR.”
Our goal in government should be to be better than my Sovereign Bank regional manager. But then again, I fear this is far, far too low a standard.
Posted on Aug 14, 2012 at 12:00 AM7 comments
I have been a relatively late adopter of Microsoft’s PowerPoint. This is partly out of a general technoconservatism (perhaps a particularly inappropriate attitude for an FCW blogger, but whatever) and partly out of a view that slides interfere with communication between a speaker and the audience by directing the audience’s attention away from the speaker.
But a few years ago, I did make the switch, though reluctantly. More recently, I had three epiphanies that made me change my attitude very dramatically.
The first was seeing how grad students on the PhD job market making presentations at the Kennedy School had greatly improved the visual content and appeal of slides, replacing busy text-filled slides featuring thick black lettering with pictures, colors and animation, going light on text. I realized that I as a presentation participant found the slides engaging and helpful to my own retention of the messages.
Second, I had an interesting reaction attending the job talk presentation of a PhD student in history who had no slides at all but presented his material the way everyone used to present it – as a lecture, half-read from sheets of note paper. My reaction was that this presentation seemed incredibly old-fashioned and dinosauric, very uninteresting – and this reaction coming from a dinosaur.
Lastly, I have been increasingly noticing in the last two years that my own younger students, products of the text-message age, have had an increasingly difficult time being able to relate to material that isn’t put down in written, visual form.
As a result of all this, I introduced slides for the first time in my executive education teaching this last spring. I had always been extremely hesitant to use slides in a discussion class, on the view that If you summarized material that was being discussed in slides, it signaled to participants that you knew what you wanted to come out in class discussion before the discussion took place. But I decided to try it.
I tried to follow the best practices I observed among grad student presentations. I made them text-light, with quick bullet points rather than lengthy disquisitions, with different colors and animation (zooming, shimmying, sentences appearing from the right side of the screen) for the words. I extensively used visuals (for example, to illustrate a point about how long it takes to learn better surgery techniques, I showed a visual of an operating room) and quotes (which I previously would have read to the class out loud). I did not put discussion conclusions on slides, but instead used the slides to list topic areas or themes (rather than spending class time to elicit these themes) and, as part of the conclusions, to list points, often coming from academic research, that I knew from past experience seldom got raised in class.
I saw the first results while I was teaching, which was a dramatic increase in the amount of student notetaking. But I just got more detailed results -- my students’ evaluations of the first classes where I used the PowerPoint presentations. My overall teaching ratings went up. But there was a very dramatic increase in one specific area: “Clarity of the main ideas presented in class.” With the slides, participants were able to absorb main points and themes better.
This has been a real eye-opener. I know some people believe slides inhibit learning. I am now inclined to think that, used well, they really do help learning. And this is with executives who are not part of the videogame, text-message generation. I haven’t even tried this yet on my twenty-something master’s students; this will happen when the semester starts in a few weeks. There is something here, I think, not just for professors, but for managers or anybody else trying to get messages across.
Posted on Aug 09, 2012 at 12:09 PM7 comments