Adventures in Babysitting

One item in the 2008 Intelligence Community Employee Climate Survey stood out at me. 85 percent of the nation's spooks and intelligence analysts, support staff, et.al. agree that "My supervisor supports my need to balance work and family issues." I thought the number was strikingly high--it's ten points higher than the government as a whole on the 2008 Federal Human Capital Survey. So I asked Dr. Ron Sanders, the intelligence community's chief human about it. This is how he explains it:

We’ve made a lot of progress there. Individual agencies have set a high standard in that regard, especially those agencies that deploy people overseas. We’re one of the few, perhaps the only federal entity that affords civilian employees family support in work-life programs in our strategic human capital plan. We’ve extended agency-restricted health and insurance plans across the entire intelligence community. In the last 6 or 8 months we rolled out an intelligence community-wide child-care placement program. We now have a subscription-based website called Work-Life for You that provides daycare search support, job search support, and even such things as quick and easy dinner menus for working families. There’s an intelligence community employee assistance fund. It’s a charity we’ve created to support intelligence community families in need. But I want to give credits where it’s due. This falls on the shoulders of first-line managers, and while we are a very, very mission-oriented institution, I think they’ve realized with our operating tempo, you can’t push too hard.

We tend to think of folks in the intelligence community as tough, hard-edged, aggressive, and totally committed to their jobs. We don't tend to think of them as people with families, and with lives outside of work. But not everyone lives in a John LeCarre novel. Folks have kids, and folks have hard times. It's great that the intelligence community is trying to anticipate the situations in which they'll need help.