It is no secret that improving employee engagement can lead to positive workplace outcomes. Our analysis found that employee engagement could impact another critical government objective—public trust. It is worth delving deeper into this relationship.

Introduction
 

The contact center at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) faced a dual crisis: rising customer dissatisfaction and a nearly 200% attrition rate among its contact center employees. The bureau was alarmed that some disengaged employees frequently used negative language with customers, such as “I can’t do that,” rather than positive language, such as “Let me look into that.” Worse, some provided wrong information to rush customers off the phone.

The bureau realized that in order to improve customer experience, it was critical to improve the employee experience. Armed with this insight, the bureau set about streamlining the scheduling process, offering more breaks to employees, and improving training, among other interventions. Improving scheduling processes gave employees greater flexibility and training helped provide the skills needed to meet one of the contact center’s key missions—customer satisfaction. These changes served as important levers that helped improve employees’ experience at work. As a result, within the first month of implementing these changes, customer satisfaction at the BMV had skyrocketed to 92%.¹

If employees offer good services quickly, citizens are likely to think better of government’s competence. If employees are empathetic and listen to citizens’ needs or complaints, citizens are more likely to see government acting from a place of positive intent. Since competence and intent are key ingredients in individuals’ perceptions of trust, the quality of these interactions can have a bearing on public trust.

Current data indicates that trust in government has been falling. After reaching an all-time high in the 1960s, public trust in the US government has been on a perpetual decline—and was at 24% in 2021 (figure 1).²

How can governments address this problem of declining trust? Are there targeted steps governments can take to rebuild trust? In practice, assessing trust and the factors behind it can be tricky, as trust reflects an individual’s perception. Trust is the combination of beliefs, perceptions, and feelings shaped by our individual and collective experiences. In general, however, trust is a function of repeated successful interactions between the customer or constituents (in this case) and the service provider or government agency.

With this conceptualization, Deloitte surveyed about 4,000 Americans to assess their trust in US federal government agencies by looking at two elements—perceived competence and intent (see sidebar for details of our methodology).

Among those people surveyed, the US federal government was found to have the lowest trust among any entity in any sector—including state and local governments and commercial entities.³ This statistic can be problematic at any time, let alone during a time of public health crises. When the federal government embarks on significant government-sponsored activities such as national vaccination drives, stimulus programs, and digital transformations of unprecedented scale, it relies on public support (trust in government) to act as a multiplier, generating additional engagement in government programs and incentivizing collaboration by private companies.

President Biden recently incorporated trust into his FY22 budget plan, indicating rebuilding trust to be one of the administration’s top priorities. The budget includes citizen trust-building initiatives such as increasing transparency, improving program integrity of government funds, and approaching government program design and delivery with an equity lens. Also, the post–COVID-19 work policy announced by the federal government includes plans to improve trust indirectly by improving federal employees’ work conditions. The work policy aims to implement remote work, flexible work schedules, and manager training on equitable performance management for hybrid teams in an effort to provide better working conditions to federal employees.⁴

Much of the literature on building trust in government focuses on improving the citizen experience by examining transparency initiatives, citizen engagement, and data privacy practices. But little attention has been paid to the role public sector employees might play in improving public trust.

This article explores how improving among government employees attitudes toward engagement with their work (from this point on referred to as “engagement”) might indirectly increase public trust in government.

Our preliminary analysis suggests a positive relationship between employee engagement and public trust. We do not claim that this is a definitive study on the topic, but that the initial results warrant further investigation. Studying this area further could influence government strategies to improve employee engagement and, subsequently, public trust.

Higher employee engagement leads to higher public trust
 

Our analysis found that an increase in employee engagement scores led to an increase in public trust.

One way to understand this relationship is by inverting the lens. Disengagement among employees often impacts job performance, which can lead to poor customer experiences, ultimately challenging public trust in government agencies. Importantly, it is not just frontline customer service workers that matter. Even employee engagement among back-office staff who don’t directly interact with citizens can impact trust. It is not just the smile at the counter that can impact trust, but the quality and humanity of government’s work. Regardless of how citizens interact with government, whether in person, online, on the phone, or so on, increasing employee engagement can improve the customer experience, thereby likely increasing public trust. That is the lesson of the Indiana BMV example.

The relationship between employee engagement and trust has important implications for governments. Agencies struggling with low public trust can invest in human capital management practices to increase employee morale and thus create conditions for improving public trust through better employee interactions with constituents.

Aligning employee skills with the agency’s mission can have the biggest impact on public trust
 

While all of us have different expectations from our workplace, in general, we would like to be involved in activities that are important to our organization. We want to feel that we are part of something important and that our skills support the organization’s mission. Our analysis suggests that this is the most important employee engagement parameter impacting public trust.

This parameter is measured in our data through the category "employee skills–mission match,” which is defined as:

“The extent to which employees feel that their skills and talents are used effectively. Furthermore, it assesses the level to which employees get satisfaction from their work and understand how their jobs are relevant to the organizational mission.”⁹

This category is built using five questions from the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which measures whether a job matches an employee’s talent and skill, how important it is to the agency’s mission or goals, whether it fosters a feeling of personal accomplishment, and whether the employee views the job as important.

Of the 14 categories, we found employee skills–mission match to have the strongest effect on public trust. In other words, employees who like their work, feel that their talent is being used well, and consider their work to be important, tend to put agencies in a better position to build public trust.¹⁰

Figure 4 shows a scatter plot of agency scores on employee skills–mission match and trust. The colors of the dots represent the agencies’ mission area according to Deloitte’s retail-to-regulator (R2R) framework, which categorizes government mission areas into six broad archetypes (figure 5).¹¹ (Read more about Deloitte’s R2R framework.)

We found that enforcer agencies generally lie on the lower end of the plot, indicating low employee engagement and low public trust. At the other end, we found that one of the retailer agencies in our sample enjoys both high employee engagement and high trust.

It can be easier for retail agencies to match employee skills with their agency’s missions. This is because retail agencies, generally, have a clear and straightforward mission: to provide services to a defined set of customers.

However, the same cannot be said about enforcer agencies like local and federal law enforcement agencies. In most of these agencies, employees face competing priorities like national security, protecting people, but also showing empathy and focusing on constituent experience. Such dueling priorities can dilute their mission and create a skills mismatch for their employees. When employees who are primarily trained in security and enforcement are asked to fill a customer services role, such as processing refugees seeking asylum or dealing with incoming travelers at airports, the discrepancy in what they are trained for and what they are asked to do can lead to low employee engagement.

Additionally, we found that employee skills–mission match is the most important engagement parameter, impacting all four trust signals—humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability. Its relationship with each of the other signals is statistically significant.

Our research indicates that government agencies should take clear steps to align employee goals with team goals—and with agency goals—to ensure employees understand their roles and feel aligned with the agency’s mission. That means not only training employees in the right skills for their tasks, but also showing employees how their tasks help accomplish the larger mission. Our analysis suggests this one change can have a large impact on improving public trust levels.

Teamwork, support for diversity, and strategic management are other employee engagement parameters that appear to impact public trust
 

A good employer can make employees feel part of something important and keep them happy. Research shows that organizational culture has a strong influence on employee performance.¹² Our analysis reveals that three important categories that touch on an organization’s culture—teamwork, support for diversity, and strategic management—can influence public trust through its impact on employee engagement.

An emphasis on teamwork can promote better communication and cooperation between employees. Similarly, an organization that supports diversity can help employees feel valued, respected, and welcomed. Meanwhile, strategic management practices should ensure employees have the right skills to do their jobs competently and confidently. These are all important parameters that again connect to delivering the mission. For instance, organizations that promote teamwork and support diversity have been shown to be more innovative, in general, than their counterparts, and could therefore deliver the mission more effectively.¹³

Further, we found that along with the three categories described above, “effective leadership: supervisors,” “effective leadership: fairness,” and “effective leadership: empowerment” also have a positive relationship with humanity, while “effective leadership: supervisors” and “effective leadership: fairness” have a positive impact on the capability trust signal (see figure 7 for definitions of these categories).

Sports teams are a great example of the impact of effective leadership on employee engagement. When coaches invest in their players, player performance tends to improve, resulting in more wins and happier fans.¹⁴ The United States National Collegiate Athletic Association found basketball teams that trusted their coaches won 7% more games than those that did not.¹⁵ A similar dynamic seems to be at play in the workplace, where trust in leadership typically leads to better employee engagement and higher public trust.

Looking ahead
 

Employee engagement is ultimately about how individual people view their work. To improve engagement, and therefore trust, governments can apply a range of human-centered design tools and approaches such as segmentation, journey mapping, human-centered service design, personalization, and co-creation to improve employee experience and engagement. These tools might not only improve employee experience, but the human-centered design approach can provide them a peek into what matters to its customers, thus possibly helping to improve customer experience and public trust. Additionally, diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are associated with fostering employee engagement and building a trusting climate. Focusing on these principles can improve teaming, coaching, and the relationship employees have with those they work with on a day-to-day basis.

It is no secret that improving employee engagement can lead to positive workplace outcomes. According to a Gallup analysis of 50 years of workplace data, employee engagement impacts everything from productivity to profitability.¹⁷ Additionally, higher employee engagement has been found to correlate with higher retention rates in the federal government.¹⁸

Through our analysis, we found employee engagement could impact yet another critical government objective—public trust. This relationship is worth investigating further as it can open a new and important route for governments in rebuilding public trust.

Appendix
 

The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models used for this analysis are all one explanatory variable models. This means that in each OLS model, we have used public trust as the dependent variable and only one employee engagement category as the explanatory variable. Due to this, the R-square values in the model are relatively modest. If we were to include other explanatory variables in the model—that can impact public trust—then the overall model fit (R-square) would likely improve. However, our focus was not to explain as much of the variance in the dependent variable as possible (maximizing R-square), but to establish that a relationship likely exists between trust and the explanatory variable. Therefore, we kept the OLS models as minimalist as possible.

In the figures below, we have included only those employee engagement categories that have a significant relation with composite trust as well as the four trust signals at 95% or 90% confidence levels.
 

OLS analysis results using employee engagement 2019 and public trust 2020 data

OLS analysis results using employee engagement 2020 and public trust 2021 data

Trust in government
 

It’s time to recognize the importance of trust in our public institutions. When trust in government declines, it becomes harder for government to execute on essential tasks. Trust helps government connect with residents and encourages voluntary compliance with rules and regulations. Trust can elevate government, improving performance and connecting with the common good. Now more than ever, governments should be thinking about trust as an essential component of performance. Deloitte can help public officials measure, enhance, and amplify trust in government agencies.

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