Worrisome signs in latest employee survey

Employee morale slips further

Nov. 17, 2013 – 06:00AM | By SEAN REILLY |

Katherine Archuleta, OPM’s newly installed director, pressed HR executives for ideas on how to ‘do more with less.’ (Mike Morones / Staff)

Sequester-related budget cuts. Hiring restrictions. A continuing freeze on pay rates.

For the federal workforce, those forces combined to produce sharp drops in key job satisfaction indicators, according to the latest soundings by the Office of Personnel Management.

Most worrisome to managers, perhaps, was a decline in the area of mission accomplishment: Of almost 377,000 respondents, well under half said they have the people, funding and other resources needed to do their jobs. That was down sharply from both last year and 2010.

“That’s a big one,” Justin Johnson, OPM’s deputy chief of staff, told dozens of senior human capital executives at a meeting last week. “We’ve got to figure out how to use our limited sources as efficiently as possible to mitigate that.”

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Paying the Price: Feds Increasingly Unhappy With Salaries

By Eric Katz; 12:00 AM ET

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Despite an unprecedented three-year pay freeze, a majority of federal employees are still at least somewhat satisfied with their pay. That percentage of employees who feel that way, however, is plummeting.

In 2010 — the last year feds received an across-the-board raise — 66 percent of federal workers provided a positive response when asked, “Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your pay?” according to the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. In the 2013 report, which the Office of Personnel Management released last week, just 54 percent of respondents said the same.