The underlying theme emerging from The Partnership for Public Service's awards breakfast for its annual "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government," was that the work of federal employees not only mattered, it deserves more acknowledgment and fast. That led to an apology from one member of Congress.
"I think every organization has to have a culture of recognition if it wants to get better," said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. "If you don't provide an upside incentive for doing good things, then you are not going to see so many good things happening.
"These agencies are doing great work, and I think we need to see more investment in improving the identification and recognition of great work."
The nonpartisan nonprofit, partnered with Deloitte, released its annual survey on Dec. 8, showing a 58.1 out of 100 increase in employee satisfaction in 2015, jumping 1.2 points from last year's score.
Seventy percent of the federal agencies saw employee satisfaction scores increase in 2015, up from 43.1 percent in 2014 and 24 percent in 2013, showing that concerted efforts increasing employee engagement may be taking root.
The Department of Labor scored the most improvement in large agencies, jumping 4.4 points to make it the eighth best place to work in its category. Deputy secretary Chris Lu said establishing new engagement strategies became integral to the agency, whose role is to represent the worker.
"As we made this a priority, one of the first steps we took was to increase the participation of people filling out the surveys," he said. "We started with the central principle that we didn't care if you liked us, we didn't care if you didn't like us, we just want to hear from all of you."
The result, Lu said, was a participation rate of 76 percent in 2015, 32 percent higher than 2013. The information collected from the surveys, alongside scheduled listening sessions throughout the department, gave leaders the areas they needed to focus on to engage employees.
"We took work-life balance seriously, we enacted a new workplace flexibility proposal, we eliminated outdated paper sign-in and sign-out sheets, we expressed our support for telework, we provided more options for nursing mothers and we listened to our employees," Lu said.
Related: Read the report.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., speaking at the breakfast, also noted that federal employees have often been unfairly maligned as a result of some of the political entanglements on Capitol Hill.
"I close also with an apology for the times that you have been used as a person who is to be blamed for the inefficiencies or the way we should be doing business and are not. And so, my apologies to you," he said.
Appreciation for federal employees is coming at a time when the government is pressing hard to retain them and recruit new ones. Following three years of pay freezes, the White House has signed off on a 1 percent raise in 2016, coupled with a 0.3 percent locality pay bump.
Meadows added that it's time for Congress to provide more incentives for federal service while recognizing its successes.
"What we start to see is that we are making progress, and it is important that we emphasize that progress," he said. "The observation that I have is that not only members of Congress, in a bipartisan way, make sure that we are going to put an emphasis on that, it is also important that the compensation and awards for a job well done are there as well."
Engagement has been the hot topic for agency leaders for some time, with each trying to find the right strategy to fit their organization, but Deloitte's Federal Human Capital Leader Sean Morris said the efforts to connect employers more with employees are starting to bear fruit and the report is a reflection of that.
"I'm not surprised, and many of us in the data are not surprised, to see an upturn," he said.
"At the end of the day, I actually believe that's based on the investment that these individuals in the room and their organizations and their leadership have been making around this topic, at the organization level and also at the administration level."
