Initiatives and Improved Employee Performance
Organizations can use the PPF as a tool to help identify where long-term strategic and short-term tactical improvement can increase overall employee performance and engagement. The most striking aspect of the overall study was the number of officers fully engaged despite their agencies’ unresponsiveness to them; this seems to underscore the commitment and sense of duty of those who undertake a career in policing. Although addressing employee frustration is not complicated, leaders need to stay committed in the short and long term to learning, understanding, and remedying the causes of this problem. Agencies can enjoy the long-term benefits of high employee morale, community engagement, and fiscal return on the investment in employees if leaders take a bottom-up view of the department and observe issues from the perspective of front-line personnel.
All organizations strive to have fully engaged employees whose high performance becomes engrained as an accepted norm in the agency’s culture. Increasing agency effectiveness does not happen overnight, but, over time, systematic changes will begin to reshape the culture. The process starts with leaders instituting action-oriented initiatives with milestones to measure both short- and long-term targeted goals. As organizations make structural changes at the higher levels, they begin to transform their culture at the individual level. The author offers some examples of systematic and cultural changes.
