http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5683210.html

Full survey
http://www.nbpc.net/dhsrules/cap_personnel_report.pdf


Workers at Homeland Security discouraged, survey finds
David E. Rosenbaum, New York Times
October 23, 2005


WASHINGTON - At the Department of Homeland Security, only 12 percent of the more than 10,000 employees who returned a government questionnaire said they felt strongly that they were "encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things."

In the agency, which has responsibility for protecting the country against terrorism and responding to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, only 3 percent of employees said they were confident that personnel decisions in their department were "based on merit."

Less than 18 percent said they felt strongly that they were "held accountable for achieving results."

And just 4 percent said they were sure that "creativity and innovation are rewarded."

In each of these instances and many others, the responses of the Homeland Security employees were less favorable than those of all the other departments and large agencies surveyed by the federal Office of Personnel Management, according to a study by an outside research organization.

Experts in human resources said the morale problems indicated in the survey should be of serious concern.

"It shows there is something fundamentally wrong at the organization," said Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

"If you were on the board of directors of a company and you got results like this," he said, "you would lean on the managers to fix the problem or get rid of them."

The department was created by law in 2002 and was not fully in operation until late 2003. It brought together workers from established agencies with widely varying histories, missions and cultures, including the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service, the Customs Service and the Transportation Security Administration.

Asked about the survey, Russ Knocke, the press secretary for the department, said the morale problems occurred because "the Department of Homeland Security was a merger of 22 agencies, a start-up all at once, and a number of the agencies experienced some growing pains the first couple of years."

The survey was taken by the Office of Personnel Management in 2004 from August to December.

Forms with 88 multiple-choice questions about workers' attitudes toward their jobs were sent to 276,424 federal employees selected at random, and 147,914, including 10,473 from the Department of Homeland Security, returned completed questionnaires.

The department employs 180,000 workers.