The gap between employee satisfaction in the private sector and the public sector is growing. The worst place to work in government is the Department of Homeland Security.
Remember, these are mostly union jobs. Can’t be fired. So, you work next to someone who doesn’t work and that person makes the same money you do. Over time do you reduce your effort? When raises are the same and promotions are based on who likes who, why care? It’s the DMV multiplied by thousands. Nasty, unhappy people who just get through the day. Democrats want more and more of these jobs. Bigger and bigger government doing more and more with twice the unhappy employees it would take in the private sector.
It’s yet another year of low morale and dwindling workplace satisfaction in government agencies. The annual “Best Places to Work” rankings, released Tuesday by the Partnership for Public Service, show that federal employees’ satisfaction and commitment are at their lowest point ever since the analysis began, in 2003. The government-wide employee engagement score is 57 out of 100, compared with the private sector’s score of 72 out of 100.
“There has been a failure of leadership,” says Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. His organization compiles the rankings by analyzing data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which nearly 400 agencies and their subcomponents administered to their workforce this year.
The gap between worker satisfaction in the private sector versus the public sector has nearly tripled since 2010. As morale in the former has ticked upward following the recession, morale in the latter has continued to slide downward.
The difference is particularly pronounced when it comes to rewards and advancement. Only about 42 percent of federal employees surveyed said they were satisfied with the recognition they get for a job well done. Meanwhile, 61 percent of employees in the private sector say they are adequately recognized and rewarded.
“There’s a sense that favoritism plays a large role,” says John Palguta, the Partnership for Public Service’s vice president for policy, in explaining a prevalent view among government workers that agencies don’t consistently base rewards and promotions on merit.
Training is another area in which government workers show far less satisfaction than their private-sector peers do, with only 47 percent saying they have been adequately trained for their current role.
There is one edge government still appears to have, however: The data found that, despite all the negative sentiment, federal employees are more likely than others to enjoy their jobs.
(AP)
If the latest federal workforce employee survey is any measure, the Department of Homeland Security is the worst office Uncle Sam runs, and and its Customs and Immigration Enforcement agency is its least desirable post.
The worst-ranked jobs were the subject of a congressional hearing Thursday and in some regards, they’re the usual suspects. For the last several years, DHS, which was only formed in 2003, has been at the bottom of the list, which is extrapolated from the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS).
That DHS has gotten consistently bad scores from its own employees based on morale, leadership, compensation and more, was of particularly interest in Thursday’s “Worst Places to Work in the Federal Government” hearing by the Government Operations Subcommittee headed by Chairman Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C.
“The Department of Homeland Security rests as the worst place to work among cabinet agencies, and saw its scores drop by nearly three points from 2013,” he pointed out in his opening statement. It scored lowest on leadership, fairness, empowerment and skills to match the mission, he pointed out.
“Are agency leaders doing enough?” he said. The results, he answered himself, “suggest that not enough has been done.”
The lowest ranking large agencies also include the Department of Veterans Affairs (54 percent), Department of the Army (54 percent) and the Environmental Protection Agency (56 percent) – all saw a drop from the year before.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development came in last for the mid-sized agencies with 44 percent, and the Nuclear Defense Facilities Safety Board, drags at the bottom of the small agency list with only 33 percent satisfaction.
One might think Internal Revenue Service employees are miserable given the ongoing controversy surrounding the department, but they actually do much better, with a 58 percent satisfaction rate. Among the 314 agency subcomponents ranked in the survey, two DHS departments come in dead last: ICE (35 percent) and the Office of the Under Secretary for Science and Technology (35 percent). The Transportation Security Administration did a little better with 39 percent.
There has been a morale drop across the board, says John Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service, which takes the FEVS survey (at least 400,000 employees responded in 2014) and ranks agencies based on whether employees would recommend their agency, and how satisfied they are with their job and their organization.
He said overall satisfaction among federal workers has gone from 60 percent in 2003 to 56.9 percent in 2014. He attributes a lot of this from the overhang from the 2013 shutdown and sequestration, when budgets were slashed and frozen and employees furloughed, many without pay. “It’s a huge impact psychologically,” he told Foxnews.com.
For agencies like DHS there are more internal things going on. “It’s troubling, he said. There are just plain tough jobs, like the TSA, which is managing security at the nation’s airports and are under constant fire from bad publicty. “You’ve got to feel bad for these folks,” said Palguta.
And for the ICE agents, he surmises that constant shifts in immigration policy attitudes might have something to do with morale there.
“It’s tough being a federal employee where you’re getting mixed messages on what your mission is, how you provide success,” he said. “I think that’s part of it.”
Sometimes it’s just bad leadership in the individual components of which DHS is an umbrella organization to 22 different agencies and departments, including the U.S. Coast Guard, which ranks pretty high at 66 percent.
In other FEVS findings, 7 out of 10 respondents said promotions are based on favoritism, not merit, and only 42 percent expressed confidence in their superiors.
