Your Employees Are What Keeps Your Government Running

by Michael Galello, Industry Marketing Manager for Kronos for Government and Education

View the entire newsletter for more articles:  2019 – NJAC County Biz – December

Your employees are what keeps your government running. They serve your constituents, manage budgets, maintain safety, and the list goes on and on. Each night they leave, and each morning you hope they come back. It’s important to ensure that your employees are happy. Otherwise, they’ll look elsewhere and call in sick more often. So, what are the driving motivators for employees to call out or change jobs—and what can you do to reduce absence and turnover?

Burnout, depression and anxiety, disengagement, absenteeism, and turnover are all at all-time highs. Why? Because we live in an era of rapid transformation and uncertainty. In the world, at work, in our home lives. And it’s hard on us. So, what do we do—as humans and as organizations?

While we cannot change the world around us, we can change the way we respond, adapt, and arm ourselves to tackle challenges and setbacks and show up in life. This ability is called resilience. And it is a key capacity needed to not just survive, but thrive in the world we live in today. Resilience is defined as the ability to bounce back from challenge, recover from stress, and move forward and thrive. It not only gets to the root cause behind the big people issues, such as absence and turnover, but it can also prevent them from happening in the first place.

Below are the seven proven factors of resilience:

  1. Emotion Regulation: The ability to control one’s emotions and maintain calm under adversity. It’s easy to understand how the skills of Emotion Regulation can be essential to people who face constituents all day.
  1. Impulse Control:The capacity to moderate your behavior when you’re experiencing challenges so you don’t burn bridges. Ever pressed “send” in a moment of anger on an email you immediately regretted?
  2. Causal Analysis: Being able to look at all the causes of a particular problem and work out what you can control and what you can’t, so you can funnel energy into what you can change and forgive what you can’t.
  3. Self-Efficacy: A belief in yourself that you are competent and reliable. Or the belief that you can solve problems and succeed. This is critical and so essential as it impacts how people tackle change and setbacks—or not—and ask for help when needed.
  4. Realistic Optimism: The ability to be optimistic to the extent that your reality allows without getting blindsided. Employees with this skill balance the ability to see opportunity while realistically assessing what could go wrong or deter success.
  5. Empathy: Understanding what motivates other people, what they think and feel, and being able to put yourself in their shoes. It’s critical especially for leaders and managers who need to build a culture of trust.

  6. Reaching Out: A willingness and ability to take on new opportunities even in the face of change or adversity. That’s agility and adaptability at its core.