Study After Study Shows The DHS Has An Intense Morale Problem That Can Apparently Only Be Solved By Study After Study
from the 'we've-tried-nothing-and-we're-all-out-of-ideas!' dept
Guess which national agency's feelings hurt the most?The 2014 Best Places To Work in the Federal Government Survey, published by Stier’s group, ranked DHS dead last among large agencies.Beyond the problems listed here, there are a great many reasons why it might suck to work for the DHS. To begin with, the agency is actually a Frankensteinian monstrosity consisting of 22 agencies, all with their own ideas on how to run things and nearly all of them with their own sets of problems.
[...]
Many DHS employees have said in the annual government “viewpoint” survey of federal employees that their senior leaders are ineffective; that the department discourages innovation, and that promotions and raises are not based on merit. Others have described in interviews how a stifling bureaucracy and relentless congressional criticism makes DHS an exhausting, even infuriating, place to work.
The DHS is in the (relatively) newly-minted business of securing the homeland against all comers -- mostly terrorists of the foreign and domestic varieties. Whether it's done out of paranoia or just the overwhelming need to look busy every time the national budget nears a vote, the DHS has gone overboard in its assessments of potential threats. The shorter of the two lists it has compiled by this point would be titled "Not Terrorists." Over the years, the DHS has conjectured that terrorists are hiding in food trucks, using hotel side entrances, exercising their First Amendment rights, possibly years away from graduating high school… etc.
The DHS also presides over the TSA, a security agency in name only that seems mostly interested in patting down mastectomy patients, running their brusquely officious hands over pre-teens, dumping breast milk and other "explosives precursors" into nearby garbage cans and feeling completely threatened by words printed in foreign languages.
It also keeps an eye on the CBP, which can't seem to stop shooting unarmed people, follow its own guidelines on vehicle searches, and operates a fleet of shiny, expensive and nearly useless drones.
Then there's ICE (with its own morale problems), the IP-focused Keystone Kops whose antics -- including yanking websites away from owners without a word of explanation and returning them years later without an apology, raiding lingerie shops for dangerously unlicensed panties, and struggling to come up with excuses for denying FOIA fee waiver requests -- are only outpaced by the imaginary rights vendettas of the City of London police.
That would be enough to depress anyone, especially the good employees who started out with ideals and enthusiasm but are now forced to answer question after question after question about why working for the nation's largest group of unhinged conspiracy theorists is a bit of a downer. The DHS has dumped a lot of money into divining the sources of its employees' unhappiness. But it seems more interested in spending money than fixing the problems.
The first study cost about $1 million. When it was finished, it was put in a drawer. The next one cost less but duplicated the first. It also ended up in a drawer.Yes, if anything's going to fix morale, it's going to be periodic questioning of employees who know their last several answers went completely ignored. Will the latest studies be titled "NO REALLY GUYS THIS TIME WE'RE LISTENING?"
So last year, still stumped about why the employees charged with safeguarding Americans are so unhappy, the department commissioned two more studies.
To hear people like new DHS head Jeh Johnson tell it, the agency has never been more interested in improving morale.
Johnson and Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have “personally committed themselves to improving the morale and workforce satisfaction across the Department of Homeland Security,” said Ginette Magana, a DHS spokeswoman. “They are directly engaging with employees, listening to their concerns, working diligently to improve employee recognition and training, and are focused on strengthening the skills and abilities of every employee. She said the studies “comprise a first step in a comprehensive process dedicated to tangible results.”Yeah, but what about all the other "first steps" currently tucked away in drawers, presumably still in mint condition? How many "first steps" and empty promises are DHS employees expected to suffer through before they finally wander away from the metaphoric disinterested, lying spouse they call an employer? "No, really. This time will be different, honey. I SWEAR."
As it stands now, DHS employees pretty much have to stick guns in their mouths before someone will start paying attention to their morale issues.
Three years ago, officials in the department’s office of health affairs, which provides expertise on national security medical issues, began to wonder about the health of one of their own programs. In response to low scores on the viewpoint survey, officials had set up a program, DHSTogether, aimed at making DHS “one of the best places to work in the Federal government.”The DHS spent over a million dollars on yet another study to find out why this study-prompted "Togetherness" wasn't working. The National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine arrived at this alarming conclusion.
The report, released in September 2013, concluded that DHSTogether had been starved of money and support from DHS leaders and devolved into little more than an ineffective suicide prevention program.The DHS apparently didn't feel like talking anyone down, so it buried the report on the report as well.
And the vicious cycle of studies will continue. On top of the two recently-commissioned studies, the agency plans to add a "follow-up" survey to its annual "viewpoint survey," and plans to follow up government contractor ICF's morale study with yet another study once that one's completed.
Clearly, bureaucracy -- especially the combined bureaucracy of 22 agencies forced by
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
military too?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: military too?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Who profits from these surveys?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Easy first step for morale
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Easy first step for morale
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"Going Homeland" anyone?
Hopefully it won't require an equivalent body count before DHS enacts similar reforms.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Going postal
A veritable recipe for disaster.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Going postal
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Going postal
While we've seen some studies about military forces in other parts of the world being used for police operations, and ending with less-than-optimal results, I can't speak to the correlation between the hiring of vets and, say, the police brutality problem in the US. More likely, that's just because cop is a great career path for bullies with anger-management problems, and human beings love authority so much that we find it hard to sustain oversight.
Am I saying vets with PTSD are unemployable? Of course not. But most of the PTSD victims I know (some action-hardened vets, some not) are really into not taking any shit from anyone, including bosses.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Not hard to figure out
As such the reports will keep being filed away and buried, and the bosses will continue to assure the ones handing them money that they are 'looking in to the matter', and oh by the way they need another million or two for the next round of studies.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Not hard to figure out
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Inappropriate humor
Was it wrong of me to chuckle at that?
Any place where they can't even prevent their own employees from killing themselves has got to be hell to work for.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Inappropriate humor
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
You start curing it by booting all the heads and putting your own people in that might listen to you, being grateful for the promotion.
You don't promote to get rid of the non-preformer, if anything you demote in recognition of the failure. Boosting a non-preformer just to get rid of him sets the example to the rest of how to get promoted.
Listening to complaints is not the cure, it's the first step. You actually have to do something beyond that in order to change things. As it is, the agency has set up the expectation that nothing will change and they are just going through the motions to satisfy a bitchy congress.
All of this points to a problem with leadership, starting at the top and working it's way down.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Not to mention, the hundreds of thousands of non-essential jobs (which many low income families rely on) they've created will at some point come buckling and who do you think will suffer?
I hate the DHS but there are real people with families working these jobs and not 'all' by choice...it's a disaster waiting to happen for those who depend on it for income.
Some argue that the department of defense took decades before it found its place, but this organization was birthed from fear after 9/11 and serves no other purpose than to quell those fears which don't even exist amongst the general populace.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
toxic mixture
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Old Saying
"The studies will continue until morale improves"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Inherent problem
Sadly, some parts of the vast octopus do useful work, and they get lumped in with the rest of the comic opera.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This is not a statement that is supposed to be taken literally, but man, you just know which agencies interpret it as a management strategy, don't you?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The Boogeyman Brigade.
If Terrorism was really just a propaganda ruse to scare Americans into giving up their freedoms in return for false security against a non-existent but highly publicized threat, manufactured by a cabal of billionaire fascists pretending to be the USG, then those agencies charged with keeping the country safe from such non-existent threats would indeed be filled with people who - after a few years of pointless paper pushing - found that they had no real jobs, no real purpose, no real leadership, no real reason to try and do their not real jobs, and generally felt they were all utterly useless and wasting their time.
Any "study" performed on such an agency would be guaranteed bottom drawer material.
Go figger eh. :)
---
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Precisely. :)
==========
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
FOR TIM CUSHING - FEMA
[ link to this | view in chronology ]