State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Are Civil-Service Rules the Enemy of Employee Engagement?

Governing: This is an invitation. It was prompted by a recent Gallup report, "State of Local and State Government Workers' Engagement in the U.S.," which includes two lists. One shows public employees' level of engagement with their work in each state, while the second shows the percentage of state and local employees who are what Gallup calls "actively disengaged." Two maps that show the patterns, using different shading, caught my attention.

As the maps illustrate starkly, most of the states with the highest levels of public-employee engagement are in the South. Only Idaho and Wyoming break the pattern. The states with the highest levels of active disengagement -- workers who are so unhappy at work that they "undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish," as Gallup puts it -- are Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and my home state of Pennsylvania. All six of these states' levels of active disengagement are at 20 percent of higher. (A handful of states are not included because too few employees were surveyed.)

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