The Big Picture

High-performing organizations don’t just occur by chance. Creating a high-performing organization requires a relentless focus on strong leadership and ensuring a great work environment. When employees are enthusiastic about where they work and engaged in what they do, obstacles seem smaller, difficult problems give way more easily to innovative solutions, and outcomes tend to regularly exceed expectations.

Leveling Off

The first Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings in 2003 created new and much-needed incentives for federal agencies to focus on workforce issues. These initial rankings also provided government managers and leaders with a roadmap for boosting employee satisfaction. In 2005, results from the second Best Places rankings were overwhelmingly positive -- the government-wide satisfaction index score rose significantly, as 75 percent of participating organizations increased their individual Best Places scores compared with 2003.

We see a different picture in the 2007 Best Places rankings. The overall employee satisfaction score is virtually unchanged from 2005 (61.8 in 2007, down from 62.1 in 2005), and only about 40 percent of the participating organizations show an increase in score in 2007.

So when it comes to federal worker engagement, the new rankings reveal a glass is half empty/glass is half full scenario. On the one hand, the stable government-wide index score means that the gains in employee satisfaction and engagement from two years ago are being maintained. On the other, it means that the forward momentum from 2003 to 2005 has stalled.

Looking Beneath the Surface

The stabilization of the overall index score should not be misinterpreted to represent a lack of change over the past two years. When you peel back the layers of the rankings, you see a great deal of activity.

Among the 55 large and small agencies included in both the 2005 and 2007 rankings, more than twice as many declined (37) as improved (18) over the two-year interval. During the same period, eight agencies increased their index scores by at least seven percent, while six agencies posted equivalent declines.

A deeper examination of individual agency scores offers an excellent illustration of how static index scores do not always equal static conditions. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) overall index score increased slightly over the past two years (from 49.1 in 2005 to 49.8 in 2007), and it ranks 29th of 30 in 2007. What this score doesn’t tell you is that the Transportation Security Administration, the lowest-rated federal subcomponent in 2005, enjoyed a 6.3 percent increase and no longer ranks last. Looking within the DHS subcomponent numbers, you also see that the Federal Emergency Management Agency score dropped about 13 percent since 2005, and DHS headquarters’ score dropped 29 percent from 2005, the largest decline of any subcomponent.

Further evidence that change is taking place across government can be found by looking at the “spread” — defined as the gap between the top-ranked and lowest-ranked agency. Compared to 2005, the spread increased by 19 percent in 2007¹. Moreover, among the 26 agencies that have participated in all three Best Places rankings, the spread has increased by 83 percent since the first Best Places rankings in 2003.

Another key finding is that dramatic change is possible, regardless of an agency’s size, mission or workforce makeup.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) earned the distinction of this year’s most improved large agency by increasing its score almost 10 percent. The SSA story is particularly noteworthy because the agency has a larger proportion of lower and mid-level employees (GS 7 to 12) than most of the other highly-ranked agencies, in spite of research on employee satisfaction (including Best Places) that consistently shows that lower-level employees are less satisfied than their higher-level colleagues.

The U. S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) also proves that change is possible. OPM’s index is up 1.3 percent in 2007, enough of an increase to move OPM up one notch in the rankings. What makes OPM’s increase particularly noteworthy is that the survey was conducted as approximately 1,600 former Defense Security Service (DSS) employees were being assimilated into OPM’s Federal Investigative Service Division, which ranks 214 out of 222 subcomponent organizations. If the 2007 OPM score had been calculated based on responses from employees in the same components as in 2005 (i.e., excluding the former DSS employees), OPM would have increased its score by almost 15 percent (from 54.9 to 62.9), making it the most improved large agency in 2007.

The rising participation rate in the employee survey (the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey), on which the Best Places rankings are based, is another encouraging development. The 2007 employee response rate increased to 57 percent, up from 54 percent in 2005 and 51 percent in 2003. The 2007 rankings also reflect the views of more employees than ever before – about 221,000 federal workers — almost a fifty percent increase from 2005 and more than two times the number that participated in 2003.

Survey participation stands out, because it is a behavior that demonstrates increased employee engagement. Employees who don’t care, don’t trust, or think others don’t care, will not take the time to fill out surveys.

Key Drivers

One of the key questions that underpins all of the findings is, “What drives worker engagement?” The 2007 results show that employee satisfaction is driven primarily by three workplace categories — effective leadership, the match between employee skills and the mission of the organization, and work/life balance.

The Best Places “best in class” category rankings reveal that none of these three indicators of employee satisfaction improved in 2007. Leadership and skills/mission match stayed flat and work/life balance declined by 2.4 percent. Leadership, the category most closely linked to employee satisfaction, ranks 8th of the 10 categories (at 50.5, almost 30 points lower than skills/mission match).

These are just a few of the headline findings of this year’s Best Places rankings, and much more can be learned with a closer examination of the Web site. For example, the site’s demographic rankings section reveals that ratings are consistent across gender and age, with marginally higher scores for women than men, and with younger workers happier than their senior colleagues. Deeper in the analysis section, you will learn that the federal government still lags the private sector in many areas of workplace satisfaction, but federal employees “like the work they do” more than their private sector counterparts.

The bottom line is that the 2007 Best Places rankings offer an abundance of useful information for both job seekers and federal managers, and, with the addition of more longitudinal data with each newiteration, Best Places will continue to become a better resource.

 

1. Based on comparison of all agencies in both the 2005 and 2007 rankings, except the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), which scored almost 25 points below the next-highest agency in 2007. We excluded FLRA from this and other analyses because it is far outside the range of the other agency scores.

 

© 2007 Partnership for Public Service