An Analysis of Employee Attitudes at Federal Departments & Agencies

What a Recent Government Survey Tells Us about Our Efforts to Protect Ourselves against Terrorist Attacks and Respond to Natural Disasters

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Homeland Security Ranks Far Below Rest of Government in Employee Ratings of Performance and Leadership

Over the past several decades, employee surveys have become an essential tool in organization management. Corporations began to recognize in the 1970s that such surveys not only provided useful information about employee job satisfaction, morale and retention prospects, but also provided corporate directors and senior managers with important information about how effectively individual pieces of their businesses were being managed, where opportunities for boosting productivity and product quality lay and where management efforts and corporate communication were failing to meet expectations.

In more recent years, such surveys have also become important tools for effective management in government. While public sector organizations may not share the motivation of businesses to maximize profits, they have an equally compelling need to improve organizational performance, increase the quality of services and reduce the cost of providing those services to the taxpayer.

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Scott Lilly is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.