WASHINGTON – Exploring the cosmos makes employees happy, federal employees enjoy working from home like everyone else, and an agency that has struggled with low morale is showing improvement.
These are some of the highlights from a survey released Monday of more than one million federal workers.
In a city that revolves around the federal government, the annual Best Places to Work survey is a closely watched and brag-worthy annual event — as long as you’re one of the agencies like NASA or the Government Accountability Office that led the survey .
The survey uses information from the Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and is produced by the Partnership for Public Service and the Boston Consulting Group.
It covers 532 federal agencies, including 17 large agencies, 26 medium-sized agencies, 30 small agencies, and 459 subcomponents. The rankings were first released in 2003, and well-performing agencies have been known to publish the results on their websites.
NASA has held the top spot for 12 years, a fact the agency touted on its website, as agency administrator Bill Nelson praised the team as a “team of wizards.”
NASA topped the list of large agencies, while the Government Accountability Office — often called the “congressional watchdog” because it examines how government money is spent — topped the list of medium-sized agencies. according to the survey, it was the first among small agencies.
At the opposite end of the scale, the Social Security Administration remained last among the 17 large agencies. Scores for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development declined for the second year in a row, placing them near the bottom of their respective categories. The Export-Import Bank of the United States ranked last in the small agencies category, while the Federal Bureau of Prisons, with a score of 38.1 out of 100, was at the bottom of the subcomponent list.
The survey measures job satisfaction and engagement on a scale of zero to 100. The survey found that overall job satisfaction and engagement across the federal workforce rose slightly to 65.7; this represents an increase of 2.3 points compared to the 2022 numbers.
Among large agencies, the Department of Homeland Security has seen the greatest improvement. The department is the third-largest in the federal government, with about 260,000 employees who do everything from responding to natural disasters to patrolling the border with Mexico. Created after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, it often faces morale problems.
The survey did not specify what the agency did to move up the rankings, but an answer can be found on the Reddit subgroup for federal employees. The agency’s leader, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, may go down in history as only the second Cabinet member to be impeached due to Republican anger over his role in immigration, but among the agency’s vast workforce he is sometimes referred to as St. policies. Under his watch, the Transportation Security Administration’s front-line workforce also received significant pay raises.
In a key post-pandemic development, telecommuting is proving as popular among federal government workers as it is among the private sector. Federal employees who teleworked recorded the highest scores – 74.6 out of 100 – compared to others who worked at headquarters or in local offices. The data shows that almost 54% of federal employees have hybrid work schedules, while 14% telework full-time. Around 32% go to the workplace daily. These numbers are basically the same as in 2022.
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