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Public organizations have long sought to increase workforce diversity and employee inclusion, a goal that has only increased in recent years. The study examines a racially diverse state government agency to explore how employee perceptions of diversity and inclusion relate to workplace happiness, employee engagement, and job satisfaction. Using original survey data of over 1,800 workers, this study explores how employees perceive diversity and inclusion, how these perceptions relate to overall workplace happiness, and examines the factors that may lead to more positive perceptions of diversity and inclusion. The analysis employs principal component analysis and multilevel regression modeling. The findings underscore the connections between overall workplace happiness and positive perceptions of diversity and inclusion. The key takeaways for public organizations include the importance of senior leadership when it comes to cultivating a diverse and inclusive environment. Finally, a notable finding is the statistically significant increase in positive feelings around inclusion and diversity for historically underrepresented racial groups and that low pay for long-term employees decreases these feelings.

Public management practices that take a holistic approach are increasingly necessary; trauma-informed care, when embedded within public service, recognizes histories, experiences, and emotions of individuals. Many public servants experience vicarious trauma, by the very nature of their work, and there is a need to recognize this reality and use tools and techniques that are appropriately trauma-informed. Many organizations utilize trauma-informed care principles to engage with clients or citizens in arenas like social work, mental health, or addiction care, yet fewer organizations take a trauma-informed approach with their own employees to provide a safe and supportive workplace. Trauma-informed public management, conceptualized as embedding the six principles of trauma-informed practices into an organizational ethos, represents an opportunity to center the affective needs of public and nonprofit employees and managers who often bring their own traumatic experiences with them to their role and/or experience vicarious trauma in their jobs. The authors use applied examples from public sector responses to the COVID-19 pandemic — a prolonged and traumatic experience shared by public servants and citizens alike — to demonstrate these six principles and outline how trauma-informed techniques can be implemented now to benefit the public sector workforce.

AbstractThe Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) posits that policy actors, including elected officials and bureaucrats, aggregate into coalitions based on shared beliefs and coordinate to achieve policy objectives. Yet, bureaucrats are often subject to political control mechanisms understood within a principal‐agent framework. Combining insights from principal‐agent theory and the ACF, we explore the nature of principal‐agent relationships within and across advocacy coalitions in the United States using case studies of nuclear waste management and fair housing policy. Specifically, we develop three propositions regarding principals and agents as members of advocacy coalitions and examine those propositions by comparing the two case studies. We find that powerful elected officials and expert bureaucrats are important resources for coalitions; bureaucrats are in coalitions but face cross‐pressure from principals in opposing coalitions; and control mechanisms embedded in policy designs by principals can limit bureaucratic discretion in a way that aligns with coalition goals.Related ArticlesNeill, Katharine A., and John C. Morris. 2012. "A Tangled Web of Principals and Agents: Examining the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill through a Principal–Agent Lens." Politics & Policy 40(4): 629–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2012.00371.xPeterson, Holly L., Mark K. McBeth, and Michael D. Jones. 2020. "Policy Process Theory for Rural Studies: Navigating Context and Generalization in Rural Policy." Politics & Policy 48(4): 576–617. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12366Swigger, Alexandra, and Bruce Timothy Heinmiller. 2014. "Advocacy Coalitions and Mental Health Policy: The Adoption of Community Treatment Orders in Ontario." Politics & Policy 42(2): 246–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12066

Amid a global pandemic, unprecedented numbers of citizens relied on essential public employees as lifelines for their health, safety, and connectedness to the broader community. These public servants worked tirelessly through collective trauma to ensure their neighbors had what was needed to maintain some semblance of a routine in an otherwise unpredictable environment. This article uses narrative inquiry to examine the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic disruption on the public sector workplace, the quality of work life, and to investigate how employees coped during the crisis. Our research reports on interviews with 43 front-line and behind-the-scenes public employees who describe how they coped, maintained their public service motivation, and worked through increased demands for emotional labor in this new work-life environment. The findings suggest the need for human resources policies that allow for a flexible, reflective, holistic, and person-centered approach.