The first employee works for the government and believes the work has intrinsic value and that there is a duty to serve the American public as well as possible.

The second employee, a contractor, enjoys the job but needs to work 60-hour weeks, split between this project and two others, to earn a bonus this year. The contractor also wants consideration for a future promotion up the corporate ladder.

While this may be an oversimplification, my experience in both the public and private sectors has shown that balance between these divergent motivations is critical to achieving successful results in the modern federal workplace.

This is particularly important as the federal government increasingly looks to the contractor community for expertise and cost savings when addressing some of its most pressing needs. This issue is further compounded as an in- creasing number of federal jobs are subject to competitive-sourcing initiatives under the President’s Management Agenda.

For instance, the Office of Management and Budget re-ported in April that over 26,000 federal jobs will be subject to public-private competition in 2006, a 500 percent increase from 2005.

One of President Bush’s key areas of emphasis is creating a federal government that is accountable, results-oriented and appropriately aligned with strategic goals. Federal managers face difficulty in meeting those objectives when overseeing contractors who are not on the organizational chart and sometimes do not work in the same physical space.

Furthermore, contractors do not take the oath of office required of federal employees, highlighting this difference in motivation and further widening the rift when employees see that they are paid and evaluated differently for performing the same job.

Federal managers must create an effective “blended” workforce by understanding the key differences intrinsic to the two core groups.

Government managers must learn the way the private sector operates in order to manage contractors effectively. For example, federal managers tend not to know how contractors manage their time or how to motivate them effectively.

Acquiring these skills will enable managers to develop more targeted expectations or measures of success. At the same time, those managers need to teach their contractor staff about working with government, which operates much differently than the private sector. Ultimately, the federal manager is responsible for understanding both sides of this relationship.

Federal managers must effectively communicate their expectations to contractors and federal staff alike, identifying reporting relationships and stressing that every member of the team is critical to a project’s success, no matter who signs his or her paycheck. They must find ways to ensure that everyone takes ownership of a project and sees the value of the work.

For example, if my office is developing a new system, I want that system to be a success story, not only for the government but for the contractor as well. This leads to greater investment in the project by everyone involved and breaks down some of the barriers inherent in the relationship between the public and private sectors.

Federal staff cannot look to the extremes of the relationship scale to define contractors as either “enemies” or “part of the family.” Contractors are somewhere in the middle. While they are on board to help, they are also there to make money.

Ultimately, however, whether the intrinsic or monetary value of a completed project is a more worthy “reward” should not define the relationship between federal staff and contractors. One must look to why those contractors are being paid in the first place, which is also a principal motivator for federal employees—to help the government achieve an objective that is in the public’s best interest.

Sam Mok is chief financial officer of the Labor Department.