WASHINGTON — Exploring the cosmos makes for happy employees, federal employees enjoy working from home just like everyone else, and an agency struggling with low morale is showing improvement.
Those are some of the highlights from a survey released Monday of more than a million federal employees.
In a city that revolves around the federal government, the annual Best Places to Work survey is a closely watched and bragging rights annual event, provided you’re one of the agencies like NASA or the Gov. Accountability Office topping 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 includes 532 federal agencies, including 17 large agencies, 26 medium agencies, 30 small agencies, and 459 subcomponents. The rankings first appeared in 2003 and agencies that do well are known to post the results on their websites.
NASA has held the top spot for 12 years, a fact the agency touted on its website when the agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson, praised the staff as a “team of wizards.”
NASA topped the list of large agencies, while the Government Accountability Office – often called the “congressional watchdog” because they investigate how government money is spent – topped the list of mid-sized agencies. The National Indian Gaming Commission first appeared on the survey was the first among small agencies.
At the other end of the scale, the Social Security Administration continued to rank last among the seventeen major agencies. The scores for the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development fell for the second year in a row, putting them near the bottom in their respective categories. The Export-Import Bank of the United States was at the bottom of the small agency 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 among the federal workforce increased slightly to 65.7; that is an increase of 2.3 points compared to the 2022 figures.
Of the major agencies, the Department of Homeland Security saw the most 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. It was founded in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack and often faces morale problems.
The survey did not specify what the agency had done to rise in the rankings, but one answer was 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 ousted amid Republican anger over his role in immigration, but among the agency’s vast workforce he is sometimes referred to as St. Mayorkas for his liberal free time. policy. Under his watch, the Transportation Security Administration’s frontline staff have also received significant pay increases.
In a major post-pandemic development, telework is proving to be as popular among federal government employees as it is among the private sector. Federal employees who telecommuted full-time had the highest scores — 74.6 out of 100 — compared to others who worked at headquarters or in field offices. The data shows that nearly 54% of federal employees have a hybrid work schedule, while 14% telecommute full-time. About 32% visit their workplace every day. Those figures are largely the same as in 2022.