Executive Training to Enhance Employee Engagement in Public Service: Evidence from a Field Experiment with the Government of Luxembourg (Provisional title)

By introducing a repeated national survey of public servants ? which is currently lacking ? the project would provide evidence to the Ministry of Public Service and participating government institutions on employee engagement and motivation, variation in personnel management practices within and across government institutions, the effectiveness of these practices to enhance employee engagement and motivation, and capacity to trace how employee motivation and engagement, and management practices change over time in each government institution across two waves of the survey. As such, the project would help introduce an important management diagnostic in government ? a repeated government-wide survey of public servants focused on employee engagement and management practices shaping them. The results would allow evidence-based improvements to personnel management practices ? and thus intermittently public employee motivation, engagement, and public service delivery to citizens. What is more, the project would provide a rigorous impact evaluation to assess whether informing public managers about the survey results and training them to use the survey results to improve management makes a positive difference. Upon its basis, the Ministry could make an evidence-based decision about the institutionalization of the survey ? that is its regular application in government ? after the completion of the ESRC-FNR project.