It’s official. According to 10,400 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, the agency tasked with protecting The Homeland offers the least amount of job satisfaction of any federal agency. The survey, conducted by the government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM), asked federal employees various questions about measures of job satisfaction and agency performance. The results were released yesterday. In an email to all DHS employees, Chief Operating Officer Michael Jackson said of his agency’s failing marks, “What you said shows that DHS is not where any of us wants to be.”

Where DHS is — measured alongside 36 federal agencies surveyed — is at the bottom of the federal barrel. Low morale hardly breeds stellar performance and the only thing more appalling than these results is Jackson’s observation that, “on the whole, it is not significantly changed since OPM’s 2004 employee survey.” Also in his email, Jackson wrote, “Secretary Chertoff and I discussed these results with concern.” A better word choice might have been “alarm.”

Here’s how DHS employees rank their jobs — with 36th being last place:

36th on the job satisfaction index
35th on the leadership and knowledge management index
36th on the results-oriented performance culture index
33rd on the talent management index

And here are few places where DHS employees gave management some of its lowest marks:

a) Recognition for doing a good job
b) Dealing with poor performance
c) Promotion and pay increase based on merit

Let me translate the latter part:

a) Hardworking DHS employees who do a good job are not recognized for doing a good job

b) Not-so-hardworking DHS employees who deliver a poor performance are not being held accountable for their poor performance on the job

c) Hardworking DHS employees do not get raises according to how hard they are working while poor performing employees get raises based on something other than their poor performance.

There is something drastically wrong with this picture. Jackson promises change:

“In the days ahead, our Under Secretary for Management, Paul Schneider, will join the Secretary and me in evaluating carefully the details of the OPM survey… We will do so with a sense of urgency and seriousness.”

Stay tuned for The Aviation Nation’s reporting on the “urgency and seriousness” with which DHS acts to clean up its act. After all, in the “Importance” line of Jackson’s email message, he wrote “High.”

Read the survey in entirety here.

Share This Article