A federal employee morale survey is worthwhile...but not this way

On Nov. 13, the Partnership for Public Service announced that it would field a privately funded (and fueled) federal employee climate survey—a survey that is required by the law—to replace the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey that the Office of Personnel Management and the Trump administration have now officially “postponed” until at least next year. 

That’s the good news. The bad? For various reasons, including its methodology, the Partnership’s survey is too flawed to work, and I say this with all due respect. Thus, we need to revisit this, and here are some ideas in that regard. 

Bottom line up front: Employee satisfaction and organizational climate surveys are useful and well worth the federal government doing. That’s a point that I’m sure the Partnership made with OPM Director Kupor—not that he needed it—and I’ll echo it. However, as I’ve said before, the current FEVS was never designed to achieve that goal; rather, it was designed to assess progress against President Bush’s Management Agenda and always needed to be reworked...or replaced altogether. 

That will take some time. But it is too important to be rushed. Moreover, it cannot and should not be done unilaterally. Nor should it be done (or analyzed) in isolation.

Thus, even assuming OPM can collaboratively develop a survey instrument specifically designed to measure morale and satisfaction, NO such survey, no matter how well designed, is useful if viewed by itself. To the contrary, such a survey is only meaningful when considered in the context of real results...and in the case of the federal government, that means the many mission outcomes and metrics that each agency has. 

That’s what we need to be measuring: The relationship between government employee (and government contractor) morale and climate, results, and citizen satisfaction! In other words, we need to be looking at a much more balanced scorecard! And interestingly, that’s precisely what we fielded in the Internal Revenue Service when we “transformed” it back in 1998. But more on that below.

Let’s measure morale and climate, but not via the ‘old’ FEVS

First things first. As I have noted ad nauseum, the current FEVS instrument was never designed to serve as a true (and recurring) barometer of federal employee morale. As one of the architects of that original survey when I was OPM’s associate director back in 2004, we designed it to measure progress against the President’s Management Agenda. Unfortunately, it has remained largely unchanged since, mainly to ensure—through sophisticated correlation analysis—that longer term trends in employee morale and climate can be measured. 

But sophisticated correlations notwithstanding, that desire for long-term trend analysis has been taken to an illogical extreme, and the survey has since morphed into something it was never intended to be.   

That is not to say that the federal government and its various agencies do not need some enterprise-wide measure of morale and organizational climate. On the contrary, no modern organization can exist without one. An organization’s people are important, whether they are civil servants or contractors or something in between, and it is thus important to know what they’re thinking and why...as objectively as possible. And it would be ideal if those indicators were able to be viewed year over year, so that longer term trends can be discerned. 

However, that goal (that is, to look at those indicators over time) has become an ill-advised end in and of itself. And that’s problematic. Too many argue that given the first point—that employee surveys are critical—the second logically follows: that is, that the current instrument should continue to be administered as it currently exists, so as to ensure continuity. Despite the fact it was never intended to do what it is now being asked to do. 

So, I would implore OPM and whomever it may tap to help it (to include the Partnership and others) to take the current pause as an opportunity to redesign the instrument from scratch. And in so doing, make sure that it is useful and that it is tailored to our government and its Constitution. 

We need a ‘both/and’ solution to measuring federal agency climate

By itself, a single employee survey like the FEVS implicitly assumes that the federal government is a monolithic employer of only civil servants. But it is neither of those things. 

Federal agencies—even agencies within the same cabinet department—have far different missions, and they accomplish those missions with different combinations of government employees and contractors. Thus, the IRS doesn’t do the same thing in the same way as the Comptroller of the Currency or the Bureau of the Mint, nor does the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Homeland Security Department. The same is true of the Defense Department (it’ll always be DOD to me), and lots of others. 

And those differences need to be reflected in any survey...if it’s to be a useful one, and not just an exercise in partisan politics. And just taking the current FEVS private doesn’t fix that. 

That also means that a “one-size-fits-all” solution won’t work. at least not by itself. Each federal agency serves a different “public” comprised of different co-producers, contractors, constituencies and political coalitions, and those are (or should be) reflected in the result that each agency pays most attention to: That is, how is it serving American citizens? 

That is ultimately a question for an agency head, OPM and the Office of Management and Budget, the White House and perhaps even the Congress—after all, as we all know too well, what gets measured gets done—but the main point is that those results really matter, and by definition, they will differ by agency and mission. And those agency-specific results ultimately serve as the true independent variable in any survey. 

For example, what does it tell you if employee or subcontractor morale is poor or agency climate subpar, but that satisfaction on the part of the citizens they serve is high? Or vice versa? Or what if an agency’s contractors or its technology are the basis for that satisfaction, good or bad?  

Thus, it is not so simple as to identify and celebrate “the best places to work” in the federal government if those places—and the agencies they represent—are performing poorly. And on the other hand, if business results (including technology and more importantly, outcomes), employee/customer satisfaction and organizational climate are all aligned, that’s quite useful...especially to us citizens. 

However, as noted, there is also a need to have a common set of metrics that cut across agency lines, especially if that survey is to be useful to OPM, the President’s Management Council and ultimately, the White House. That’s just as important as agency-specific results. So, why not have OPM require agencies to report on a small but common set of climate and morale indicators, even as they are ALSO required to report (succinctly!!) on how well they are accomplishing their own particular missions?  

And that should be the case even if those numbers aren’t always rosy. Indeed, they will likely plummet during periods of transformation (we saw as much with the IRS, the creation of DHS and the integration of the Intelligence Community, all of which I was personally involved in), as agencies strive to cut costs, introduce new technology or business processesand/or consolidate operations. That does NOT mean they’re bad or good, just that the status quo is changing. And a survey will help inform us if that is ultimately for better or worse.

Agency performance is not just about civil service morale

So, why not use that combination as a basis for identifying the “best places to work” in American government, in a way that’s unique to our democracy...that is, in terms of mission accomplishment and citizen outcomes? 

That’s not a “one-size-fits-all” model, although as noted, it can and should include a common, government-wide set of government employee/government contractor satisfaction and organizational climate metrics specifically designed to measure and compare those things across the enterprise. At the same time, such an approach also recognizes that those metrics are meaningless without tying them explicitly to agency-specific performance and outcome measures. 

Taken together, they measure what really matters. 

Think of it as a “both/and” solution. Interestingly, that sort of “balanced scorecard” is exactly what we developed under the leadership of then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti, pursuant to the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998. That Act outlawed a singular and myopic focus on tax revenue collection (especially insofar as it had led to hundreds of cases of alleged abuse), so we established a new evaluation system that measured employee morale, customer/citizen satisfaction and business results. In other words, it was far more balanced. And a government-wide approach should take a lesson from it. 

To be sure, that “both/and” solution will take time to engineer, but if the ultimate result is better, that should be what also matters...the law notwithstanding. 

Here’s yet another IRS example to ponder in that regard. Back when the1998 Act was passed, the legislation included a too-short statutory deadline to train 17,000+ IRS customer service representatives. But when Commissioner Rossotti (and I) arrived back then and took a look that that training, we concluded that it was subpar...to say the least. We subsequently went to Congress and told them that if they really wanted IRS customer service reps to be trained “the right way”—that is, in how to actually solve taxpayer problems within the law—we would have to junk and completely revamp the training...and would not meet the statutory deadline as a result. 

In other words, we could meet the law’s too-short deadline, OR we could do it right. And to its great credit, Congress told us to ignore the law and do it right. We did and the rest is history, but the lesson is worth noting. 

So, everyone needs to take a deep breath and look at a “both/and” solution that is uniquely (and collaboratively) tailored to our democracy, even if it takes some time to develop. And in so doing, here’s another suggestion: Any prospective survey—whether it’s done privately, publicly or by a combination of the two—needs all parties to talk to one another, on and/or off the record, even if talking becomes acrimonious. That’s the only way we’re going to get this done.  

But given that both must be operationalized by imperfect human beings, some of those who perform or behave poorly will inevitably escape accountability. 

In other words, no system, however well designed, will be perfect, and Americans need to recognize that imperfection and deal with it—with a smile, and most importantly, with patience—even as they press for personal solutions amidst impersonal laws and regulations. They must recognize that those laws and regulations were ultimately to protect them and their hard-earned money against the abuses of the few of their fellow citizens who may be dishonest.   

However, there is good news here. In our original Founding, geniuses like James Madison anticipated this venality as naturally occurring—in other words, it’s inherently human nature—and he and his colleagues tried to design a system of checks and balances that mitigated oppressive government actions...at their root intended to preserve our “life, liberty, and [our] and pursuit of happiness.” 

However, Madison and those other Founders never anticipated the evils and abuses of social media, and we must learn how to deal with that phenomenon (just as we learned to deal with the extremes of television when it first burst on our body politic). But in so doing, we need to step back and think about why we’re here, why we created this less-than-perfect Union in the first place: At its root, it was designed to fix things. That’s what governments do, and I think we’ve collectively lost sight of that. 

Take immigration. That system is broken, and the fix—despite what the partisans among us say—is neither an open border nor mass deportations. Don’t let criminals in, and deport those that are or who commit a crime while here. But don’t deport those immigrants whose only crime is the pursuit of the American dream, who come to this country, perhaps illegaly (at least technically) to escape violence in their home countries and who are willing to work our hardest and dirtiest jobs (too often illegally as well) to achieve it. 

That legislative fix is obvious, at least conceptually. Just give those so-called “illegal’ immigrants” a legal path to citizenship, just like our military does...and just like several legislators (including one Sen. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State) proposed two decades ago. But however it's done, our national government should just fix the problem. 

That was what it was designed to do, and our politicians should stop pointing partisan fingers and get on with it. Even if it means that their chances of being re-elected are diminished. Just fix it! And if, while they’re working on that fix, they can’t pay civil servants, then they shouldn’t be paid either. 

Bottom line: We must all recognize that we are all in this together, and that civil servants are just like the rest of us citizens...the vast majority well intentioned, a few unfortunately not. But we all need to focus on and fix the problems we face. And those fixes require a working U.S. federal government of competent, hardworking, dedicated civil servants who are willing to support the way ahead, no matter how difficult. 

But that may be asking too much. I think that the public servants I hope I represent would settle for a reopened and functioning federal government, however imperfect it may be. So, we citizens should demand that the president and the Congress—both parties and both extremes and everyone in between—get back to work. And we should also demand that as a first order of business, they put those blameless, selfless federal civil servants back to work in the process. 

Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and was a federal civil servant for almost 40 years, including over 20 as a member of the Senior Executive Service. In that capacity, he served as director of civilian personnel for the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director for HR strategy at OPM and associate director of National Intelligence for human capital, as well as the chairman of the Federal Salary Council.