Federal employees give their agencies mixed grades

While most federal employees say they are happy with their jobs, levels of satisfaction vary widely across government, according to the second annual federal employee satisfaction survey.

Sixty percent of the 13,000 federal employees who responded to the survey said they are satisfied with their jobs overall, while 27 percent said they were dissatisifed and 13 percent expressed neither a favorable nor an unfavorable opinion.

The Clinton administration is scheduled to announce the official results of the survey Friday.

Morley Winograd, director of Vice President Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR), said the results of the survey show that employees who believe their agencies take reinvention seriously are happier at work than employees who don't. The survey suggested to respondents that "working smarter and more efficiently" is an example of reinvention.

"Where reinvention has taken place, employees are incredibly satisfied with their jobs," Winograd said. In addition, happy employees say they are involved in decisions that affect their work, are proud of the quality of work done by their work group, believe managers properly use recognition and rewards, and say they have been given more flexibility over the past two years in how to get their work done.

The best-performing agencies in the survey were the Census Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Office of Personnel Management. More than 70 percent of employees at each of those agencies said they were satisfied with their jobs.

The agencies rated lowest in employee satisfaction were the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service. At those agencies, 52 percent or less of employees said they were happy with their jobs.

At the remaining 38 agencies included in the survey, between 56 percent and 69 percent of their employees said they enjoyed their work.

NPR and the Office of Personnel Management conducted the survey, which was sent in September 1999 to 750 employees at each of the 46 agencies who participated in the study. The Labor Department and OSHA also surveyed their employees using the same questions, plus additional ones. The survey had an overall margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent.

But results at each agency varied, with the margin of error reaching plus or minus 9 percent at some organizations, making direct, agency-by-agency comparisons of results impossible, according to NPR.

Eventually, the results of the annual survey will be used as part of the evaluation process of senior leaders at each agency. Employee satisfaction numbers will be balanced with customer satisfaction ratings and overall business results to determine how effective senior leaders are.

Virginia Thomas, a senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation, cautioned that employee satisfaction should be used to rate executives only after their bosses have looked at the agency's overall performance.

"If you asked whether every child should be happy with their parents all the time, that wouldn't lend itself to good parenting," Thomas said. "If you think about what's good for the taxpayer, you would hope you wouldn't start with the question, 'Are federal employees satisfied?' I'd want to know if they're satisfied, but it wouldn't be at the top of my list."

Winograd suggested agencies use the survey to gauge executive performance more and more each year as the survey becomes more reliable.

Rewarding strong performers-and dealing with poor performers-is an area that employees say agencies need to work on. Less than a third of survey respondents said their agencies do a good job in performance evaluation and management.

Employees also gave their agencies low marks in overall organizational performance, in labor-management cooperation and in reinvention.

Agencies received much higher marks for supporting diversity and creating family-friendly workplaces.

Detailed results of the survey will be posted Friday at www.employeesurvey.gov.

1999 Employee Survey - Overall Satisfaction