The federal government’s youngest cabinet-level department is also its unhappiest, and efforts to raise morale have failed, according to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—with 200,000 employees the third largest Department in the federal government—was created in response to security lapses around the September 11, 2001, attacks, and has faced low employee morale “since it began operations in 2003.”
GAO based its report on the 2011 Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which showed that DHS employees had 4.5% lower job satisfaction and 7% lower engagement in their work overall than the average federal employee. Low morale is spread across the workforce, including all pay grades and tenures, both managers and non-managers.
However, job satisfaction and engagement vary widely among DHS agencies. Three of the seven DHS agencies whose morale is below the DHS average are ones whose employees engage in substantial contact with the public: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). In the case of ICE and TSA, whose agents conduct thousands of searches on Americans at airports and at border crossings, those public contacts are inherently tense and even adversarial, which may contribute to low morale.
The GAO’s other major finding arises from the fact that the other four DHS agencies with below average morale—the Office of the Secretary, the National Protection and Programs Directorate, the Science and Technology Directorate and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis—were newly created with the department or shortly thereafter. Why these new organizations have created low-morale work environments remains a mystery, despite the fact that DHS has used focus groups, employee surveys and exit interviews to help its morale efforts.
Although DHS as a whole has lower average morale than other federal agencies, some of its agencies rate above average, including five whose job satisfaction rating was above the average even for non-DHS employees: the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Inspector General’s Office, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. Secret Service.
Although the report notes that a “TSA screener union representative described TSA’s performance assessment system as a key driver of morale problems among passenger screeners,” no response from DHS is included. The American Federation of Government Employees represents screeners.
Perhaps the only substantive conclusion reached by GAO in the report was that “DHS does not have specific metrics within [its] action plans that are consistently clear and measurable,” apparently meaning that DHS lacks the ability to determine if its morale-raising efforts are succeeding. Given that these efforts include such vague bromides as instructing agency heads to prioritize employee engagement; working to improve communication, training, diversity, and employee recognition; and strengthening leadership skills and capacity, such metrics may be unnecessary.
-Matt Bewig
To Leasrn More:
New Report Finds Old Problem: DHS has Morale Issues (by Joe Davidson, Washington Post)
House Subcommittee Hearing on Low Morale at Homeland Security Fails to Call Any Employees as Witnesses (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
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