You Don’t Need an Exciting Mission to Foster Innovation

Technology has dramatically transformed the way federal employees perform their jobs --from cloud computing to telework --but when to comes to finding new, innovative ways of doing things, most feds lack the appropriate support.

The Partnership for Public Service'sreport“Best Places to Work in the Federal Government Snapshot: Achieving a Culture of Innovation," which is based on results of the 2011 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, found that themajority of employees (92 percent) are looking for ways to perform their jobs better, but far fewer (59 percent) said they are encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things. In addition, only 38.2 percent of feds said that creativity and innovation are rewarded.Taken together, those three questions resulted in a governmentwide innovation score of 63 percent.

Those scores lie in stark contrast to how private sector workers view their ability to innovate and be creative on the job. For example, 71 percent of private workers say they are encouraged to come up with new and better way of doing things, the analysis found. “This sizable difference shows that the government has a long way to go to catch up with the private sector when it comes to empowering employees to embark on creative approaches to solving problems,” the report states...