The Federal Human Capital Survey
is an admirable Bush Administration initiative that OPM describes as,
“a tool that measures employees’ perceptions of whether, and to
what extent, conditions characterizing successful organizations are
present in their agencies. Survey results provide valuable insight into
the challenges agency leaders face in ensuring the Federal Government has
an effective civilian workforce and how well they are responding.”
As I
wrote 2 years ago, the FCC has used its status as an independent
agency to opt out of participation in the past even though other
independent agencies did participate. (This year as last time, the
Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC) got very high marks in the survey. The
obscure Court Services and Offender
Supervision Agency, a new agency that is smaller than FCC, also
ranked in the top 10 agencies in job satisfaction. So the survey was not
biased against independent agencies or small agencies.)
Below are two groups of selected questions from the survey. The first
group consists of questions for which the FCC responses were more
positive* than the government-wide response. The second group is a
sampling of questions for which the FCC responses were more negative than
the government-wide response. The 2nd column is the % of FCC responses
that were positive, by comparison the next column shows the overall
government-wide positive response. The last column shows the positive
response rate from NRC – an indication of how well a top-ranked agency
can do.
| Question | FCC Positive Response |
Government -wide Positive Responses |
NRC Positive Responses |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Questions for which FCC is better than government-wide responses |
|||
| (1) The people I work with cooperate to get the job done. | 86% | 84% | 92% |
| (7) I have trust and confidence in my supervisor. | 70% | 64% | 77% |
|
(9) Overall, how good a job do you feel is being done by your immediate supervisor/team leader? |
70% | 66% | 80% |
|
Questions for which FCC is worse than government-wide response |
|||
| (3) I have enough information to do my job well. | 66% | 73% | 85% |
|
(4) I feel encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things. |
52% | 61% | 73% |
| (5) My work gives me a feeling of personal accomplishment. | 60% | 73% | 81% |
|
(37) I have a high level of respect for my organization’s senior leaders. |
38% | 52% | 72% |
|
(38) In my organization, leaders generate high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce. |
31% | 40% | 62% |
|
(39) My organization’s leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity. |
38% | 50% | 74% |
|
(40) Managers communicate the goals and priorities of the organization. |
49% | 60% | 78% |
The first 3 questions above show that FCC employees are more satisfied
with their own work group and immediate supervisors than federal
employees in general. However, the bottom group of questions shows major
negative feelings about top management and the agency as a whole. Clearly
FCC employees have a lack of respect for “senior leaders” and doubts
about their “standards of honesty and integrity.”
I hope that the new leaders of FCC will review this report carefully and
formulate a plan to turn the situation around quickly.
* Methodology: the numbers shown are the sums of the data from the OPM
report in the “Strongly Agree” and “Agree” columns.
Cross-posted from SpectrumTalk.