GOVERNMENT WORKERS' INNOVATION AND PRODUCTIVITY MIGHT SURPRISE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 6, 1993                   TAG: 9303080745
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CHARLES T. GOODSELL
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
GOVERNMENT WORKERS' INNOVATION AND PRODUCTIVITY MIGHT SURPRISE
WILL LAID-OFF government workers who seek work in the private sector face cultural shock? That is the contention of Robert A. Lynn, government-contracts manager for Reynolds Metals, according to a report in the Feb. 25 Business section of the Roanoke Times & World-News.
Lynn gives two reasons for his claim. First, unlike industry employees, government employees supposedly have "tunnel vision." Second, they commit the sin of speaking with acronyms and talking "governmentese," thereby cutting out ordinary citizens.
Being laid off is bad enough for anyone, including public employees. But to be insulted as well is something else again - especially by a person who makes his own living from government contracts, obtained through government employees.
On the matter of "tunnel vision," it might first be mentioned that industry's employees are themselves not always the most innovative and farsighted. The managements of money-losing corporations like General Motors and IBM come to mind. Financiers on Wall Street who rearrange investments rather than create new wealth are not exactly visionaries.
As for government's employees, would we wish to say that NASA astronaut Christa McAuliffe had tunnel vision? Or Surgeon General C. Everett Koop? How about the 11 men and women who have won the Nobel Prize while in the employ of the federal government?
But wait, you might say. These are only selected examples. What are the general tendencies in government and business?
In a recent roundup of studies on this topic, Dr. Hal Rainey of the University of Georgia concluded that despite working under more restrictions, government employees show high motivation, effort and place a higher value on altruistic service than their private-sector counterparts. They also place a lower value on making money. In his own research, Dr. Rainey has generally found managers from the two sectors to be not significantly different in work motivation or willingness to innovate.
In the federal government, the overall consequences of employee motivation and innovation have in any case been impressive in recent decades, despite political rhetoric to the contrary. Between 1967 and 1990, the productive output per federal employee rose at an annual rate of 1.4 percent. This is more than twice the rate in productivity growth for that period in the private non-farm business sector.
Turning now to the "foreign language" that Lynn says government employees speak, every specialized field has, of course, its jargon and verbal shorthand. I trust that even Lynn, in his own work, has used such acronyms as RFP (request for proposals) and PPFF (price plus fixed fee). Elsewhere on the same business page in which his remarks were reported, we could find such terminology as "NYSE issues" and "NASDAQ stocks." Is this "Wallstreetese"?
It almost goes without saying that government employees must often use shorthand language for the sake of efficiency. The weather service, when alerting pilots of the snowstorm that hit the commonwealth last month, probably issued reports containing the initials SP (snow pellets) and PRESFR (pressure falling rapidly). Trooper Jose Cavazos, murdered near Potomac Mills Mall on Feb. 24 when he stopped a speeding car, may have radioed headquarters just prior to his death using abbreviations that would be unintelligible to outsiders. This is not speaking "governmentese," it is doing a dangerous job professionally.
Probably Lynn would reply that the problem of using language that cuts other people out arises when government workers speak to ordinary citizens. But even here the stereotype of a noncommunicating bureaucracy disintegrates when confronted with representative data. Some years ago, 1,700 clients of the Maine Bureau of Social Welfare were asked whether social workers "explain things so that you can understand." Ninety percent indicated they did.
We need our government employees in the jobs they now hold, where they serve and protect the public. If they must be laid off because of unavoidable downsizing, private industry and its customers would be fortunate to hire them.
Instead of exhibiting "cultural shock" in their new jobs, these new employees might just surprise employers and colleagues with some unexpected altruism and lack of purely materialist motivation. The only "cultural shock" would be the discovery that government workers do not fit the stereotypes sometimes constructed for them - stereotypes that are themselves a form of "tunnel vision."

Charles T. Goodsell of Blacksburg is professor at the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB