Employee Satisfaction and the 2012 Presidential Race

Many federal employees work flexible schedules. But in Utah, most state employees work non-traditional hours. Not for long, though. And interestingly enough, that fact might have an impact on the 2012 presidential race.

Dave Jamieson of HuffPost Politics reports that back in 2008, then-Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) issued an order implementing a four-day work week for state employees. So rather than work a 9-5 schedule five days a week, employees had to work 10 hours a day the other four days. Many state offices were closed on Fridays.

It turns out employees, by and large, liked having their Fridays free. But citizens were less enamored of the idea of not being able to access state offices and deal with employees face to face on Fridays. So earlier this year the Utah legislature passed a bill reverting to the traditional scheduling model. Huntsman's successor, Gary Herbert (R), vetoed the measure, but was overridden. So it seems that after Labor Day, the traditional five-day work week will once again be the norm in the state.

Huntsman, of course, went on from the Utah governorship to serve as President Obama's ambassador to China, before resigning earlier this year in what many political observers have assumed is a precursor to a bid for the Republican presidential nomination. He might be an interesting candidate, from a workforce management perspective. After all, one of Huntsman's stated reasons for implementing the four-day week was to boost employee satisfaction. (The other was that he thought it would save money, which it apparently did -- just not much.)

"I'm always interested in the well-being of some of our very outstanding state employees, our public servants here locally," Huntsman told National Public Radio in 2009. "There are issues about retention and recruitment. We're always trying to get the best and brightest to consider jobs in state government."

These days, that kind of rhetoric is highly unusual: Keeping public employees happy doesn't seem to be a prime concern of polticians on either end of the political spectrum.