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Thinking About the Public Service Like a Varsity Rugby Team

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There are many angles of compensation, engagement, and performance, and today I’ll explore but one.

We know that money alone doesn’t cut it for employees now. It may be that the economy has changed, it may be that more of us are summiting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and it may simply be a greater recognition of a force that was always there. Most likely, it may be all of these factors, combined with countless others. But it is not an outstanding question. Money alone doesn’t cut it.

20,000 IT employees surveyed by InformationWeek were asked “what matters most to you about your job?,” and the top answer was “challenge of job/responsibility.” Corporate Executive Board, in their research on engagement, highlighted that there is a huge difference between the factors that attract employees, and those that keep them. While salary draws employees, CEB concluded that emotional engagement was four times more powerful than rational engagement in driving employee effort – emotional engagement being, in part, belief in the organization and in your contribution to its goals.

Dan Pink cited research in his TED talk that revealed that financial compensation can actually hinder performance on creative (problem-solving, not menial) tasks, but encouraging people to take on a task as a challenge improved performance. And more and more, public servants’ real contribution is in creative problem solving, analysis, and managing complex relationships. Should we still be getting compensated like factory workers? (Hell, should factory workers still be getting compensated like factory workers? But that’s for another day.)

Rebecca Onie’s recent TED talk, called “What if Our Healthcare System Kept us Healthy,” showcased her approach to building a grassroots team to lead community-based health initiatives. Their goal was to stop sickness before it occurred; her method was to emulate college sports teams in creating a team that would draw the brightest, most creative, and most dedicated volunteers.

Every morning, students are waking up pre-dawn in campuses around the country to run themselves into the ground, practice drills over and over, and compete fiercely with their friends for positions of responsibility on sports teams. They do this because in exchange, the organization to which they belong affords them status, challenge, and unparalleled developmental opportunity.

Some organizations – including Onie’s - leverage this niche form of compensation to ensure constant first-round draft picks. The dangerous converse is having an organization in which employment is seen as a social negative, with little challenge and developmental opportunity. That would actively deter quality candidates.

This is a topic to which I’ll return, so I’ll wrap up with generalities at this point: The Public Service needs to be forever seen a challenge. And we need to get a smidge more ruthless with our feedback and development.

We have work to do internally in making sure this is always so, and we have a lot of work to do externally in demonstrating our work to Canadians and prospective public servants; our successes over challenges never seem as interesting in print as our missteps.



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