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Carrie Cross is former director of the Association for Talent Development’s Government and Healthcare Communities of Practice.  Cross holds a Masters of Public Administration (MPA) from the George Washington University, and serves on the board and advisory committees for the Coalition for Effective Change, Public Employees Round Table, and Young Government Leaders. She has also worked in other arenas within the public sector for more than 10 years through LMI Government Consulting, The American Red Cross, and The United Way of America.

Carrie Cross

Employee engagement is one of the most talked about issues in government today. Amid falling engagement levels across government, and a presidential mandate to improve them, managers and agency leaders are taking a hard look at what works and what doesn’t when it comes to boosting morale. The Social Security Administration (SSA) may have a few answers to that question. The agency’s talent development policies have made it one of the few in government that can boast the highest levels of employee engagement—all while continuing to serve the nearly 59 million Americans who depend on more than $863 billion in Social Security benefits. At the helm of that effort, SSA Commissioner Carolyn Colvin has prioritized training and leadership development to keep engagement levels high despite increasing workloads, decreasing resources, and high attrition. In an exclusive interview with ATD’s The Public Manager, Colvin identified three major factors that have contributed to SSA’s success when it comes to cultivating a culture of engagement. First, training is a top priority for the agency, said Colvin, noting that giving an employee the tools they need to feel confident in their ability to do their job is one important first step towards creating engagement. “Even in this austere budget environment, SSA emphasizes training and development. It’s a natural tendency to cut training when you have budget challenges, but I think that’s the absolute last thing that should be cut,” said Colvin. Second, SSA closely monitors engagement surveys and follows up with departmental action plans designed to identify and address factors that could hurt engagement. “When we get the results of the federal engagement survey, we break it down into its various categories, and each agency component is required to develop a plan of action to raise those engagement scores,” she said. Colvin added that an important follow-up step SSA takes is to actively communicate what the agency is doing as often as possible. And the third way SSA addresses engagement is to take a close look at how, and where, its employees work. With employees in offices around the country, addressing talent needs by moving competent managers and other workers with specialized skills may not be a viable option. Instead, said Colvin, one way to promote growth and prevent attrition may be to make the workplace itself more flexible. “SSA is really implementing telework, and we’ve had a lot of good experience with that strategy. I hope it can give our workforce some flexibility,” Colvin said. Read the full interview with Social Security Commissioner Carolyn Colvin in the debut digital issue of The Public Manager in September. Not a TPM subscriber? Sign up here to receive TPM, the only journal of its kind—an opportunity for public managers and executives to write and share ideas about critical public management issues.

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The Social Security Administratino's talent development policies have made the agency one of the few in government that can boast high levels of employee engagement. Acting Commissioner Carolyn W. Colvin explains how.

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