Fun With Numbers

Matt Yglesias points to Lee Sigelman's crunching of the numbers from the most recent Office of Personnel Management biannual survey. Sigelman found that the four dimensons federal employees rate their agencies on--leadership, performance, talent and job satisfaction--were closely correlated, and so you could use them to produce an overall ranking of agencies from best-run to worst-run in the eyes of their employees.

I'm glad to see this data get some wider play, if only because it reinforces the fact that rank-and-file employees are the folks who often have the best perspective on how their agency is doing. But I think it's not actually useful to boil the numbers down and say that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is doing quite well, and the Broadcast Board of Governors not so much. Combining all four dimensions makes for a handy chart, but it actually steers conversation away from the specific reasons why employees perceive their agencies well or poorly. Workers may think their agency does a poor job of recruiting strong talent, and then also does a poor job of rewarding excellent performance. But while they may be likely to think both of those things, the solution for each problem is different. And solving each problem individually has to happen for agencies to become fully successful.