From Federal News Network:
... The President’s Management Council, together with the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, released the first data from its Federal Pulse Survey.
The first-round pulse survey, a pilot project which launched in October, went out to the approximately 2 million civilian federal employees who work in the 24 largest agencies. ...
Employees at SSA, followed by the Veterans Affairs Department and USAID, were more likely than employees at other agencies to feel exhausted in the morning at the thought of another day of work.
Employees at DHS and SSA said they were most likely to take another job that offered the same pay and benefits as their current position. ...
Respondents who work at SSA, followed by USAID, gave the lowest marks to the reasonableness of their workloads. ...
The survey data shows employees at the Interior Department, Social Security Administration and the State Department showed the lowest response rate. ...
26 comments:
Survey results reinforce the agency management is horrible and out of touch with reality. If the managers eliminate telework and refuse to to help the employees with the out of control workloads, staffing #s will continue to drop.
In 2022 few people apply to work at Social Security. Finding employees who are qualified is difficult. The employees are stressed out and overwhelmed. The results of the survey suggest a crisis with the retirement and pending quit and retirement rate.
We have already had two new hires quit due to unreasonable workloads.
For retention and hiring purposes, it would help to continue telework even when the pandemic is over.
Younger job seekers often want a flexible work schedule, including work at home.
And many older SSA employees will retire rather than to accept being forced to return to the office. The survey shows they are already unhappy.
A substantial number of people file disability or retirement online. It is purely anecdotal but in our office the numbers of internet claims went up about 30% after unemployment ran out/decreased in September 2021. It may have just been a temporary jump in the numbers but that put a huge strain on our office's internet unit. Non-internet claims can be managed now by the number of appointment slots but there's no way to limit internet claims.
The actual work done may have not gone up at all during Covid and there is probably reason to think it went down but the time it took/takes to accomplish the work has certainly gone up. Our mid size office went from having 2-3 people answering phones to 10+ and near the end of the day, everyone in the office (40) was expected to answer phones. The post entitlement (change of address, CDRs, direct express, direct deposit, overpayments, etc) workload didn't go away and because of the personnel on phones there is/was less time to work on those workloads. Since everything that comes into the FO has to be scanned to worktrack, there's a few people every day that are only doing that workload. It's much easier to look at a birth certificate that came in the mail, code the claim and clear it than it is to find it on worktrack (not unusual at all to be under some other employee's name), put it in an electronic file and then clear the claim. It wasn't unusual at all to call a claimant to ask for some document you need and have them say they brought it into the office a month ago. It could be under another employee's name which at that point would be easy to find, since you know to look for it. It could be it wasn't scanned in yet due to a backlog. Or it could be scanned in and not profiled, meaning it is scanned but until someone goes through all the unprofiled scanned images and puts an SSN and name on it, you have no idea it's even there. The unprofiled numbers could be as high as 1000 in our office which meant it was very impractical and a waste of time to look for the document until an SR profiled it.
Asking employees to do 20% more work (due to inefficiencies of working at home) in about 20% less time (due to answering the overwhelming number of phone calls) can work for a short time before many of them are burnt out.
I echo 9:14's comment. SSA's senior "management" took its cue from Saul and Congressman Johnson's attack dog on the SS subcommittee and never looked back. Nobody in the Commissioner's office has done anything to restore employee management relations or to undo the obscenely opaque, top-down management style that has persisted since 2017.
"The survey data shows employees at the Interior Department, Social Security Administration and the State Department showed the lowest response rate."
They cant even do that right from home.
I quit the WSU from a stress-related breakdown, coupled with burnout and social anxiety brought on by the pandemic. Management was unresponsive to my ability and my choices were basically FMLA or get fired. The union was useless. I burned through my sick leave, took FMLA, and quit.
I could go on for days for all the reasons I quit and how they've only gotten worse. Overall, it was a bad work environment before covid, and a toxic one during.
Maybe not, but we can spell can't
The survey is voluntary.
We don't have the time.
Well said, 7:46. I'm too busy working cases and helping claimants from home, to fill out some survey.
Not sure that trolling comments which insult thousands of SSA employees, should get through the screening and be posted here.
The SSA needs help. I had a client who was clearly disabled with cancer. Someone at the SSA told him he did not qualify for SSD only SSI even though he won at the reconsideration level. The claimant and I called the SSA together. One phone call from an attorney changed it around to give him his SSD with a pretty good PIA. It is amazing how a threat of an attorney makes them shudder.
I agree it’s a toxic environment and an awful place to work. It was bad pre-pandemic and it’s worse now. Working at home has been the only part allowing me to keep my sanity.
I’d love to quit but I have a family to care for so I can’t just leave. I too have burned through my sick leave and am trying to figure out a way to hold on a few more years till I can maybe get the early out option if it’s offered.
The amount of work is just completely unreasonable. It’s been suggested by the union to ask for a reasonable accommodation. How about you just hire enough people to do the damn job!!!
SSA is understaffed. That much is apparent.
SSA employees are also incredibly inefficient. But not for the reason driveby trolls would have you think.
The vast majority of field office inputs are done either directly into, or into a webpage pasted over, green-screen DOS style inputs from the 1980s. These inputs are not made in plain English, are buggy and sometimes require nonsensical workarounds to get things done, and take forever to train to new hires.
SSA records are stored not in plain English, but in programming shorthand that must be taught and learned, and is often misinterpreted. A new hire must learn how to decode COBOL readouts to answer a simple question posed by an SSI recipient asking how much money they're getting next month, or why they were overpaid.
There's a reason the popular wisdom is that an SSA hire doesn't contribute much until they've been with the agency 4-5 years. It's because in addition to learning the complex rules and policy governing the benefits, they must essentially become uncertified COBOL system users-slash-programmers.
SSA leadership knows how bad it is. But they're happy letting the IT functions of the agency cruise by on limited budgets, with extremely limited goals. They're afraid to approach Congress for more money, and their recent history of large IT infrastructure projects is embarrassing as well. They know that PCOM (IBM Personal Communicator, the mainframe interface software FO employees use) is reducing productivity by at least 15-20%. I've had the conversations with leadership in several different regions. They all throw up their hands; what are you going to do about it? Baltimore knows and doesn't care.
And unbelievably, they're going backwards with the few projects they do have. Ask an SSI Claims specialist how long normal inputs take now (after launching their web-browser based MSSICS interface), versus before (on green-screen PCOM). It's slow, unwieldy, crashes, and has the exact same useless partitioning of information across multiple pages. It's not even comprehensive; some inputs are still made in green-screen PCOM. Which ones? Well, that's yet another thing that takes time to teach new trainees.
There's zero attempt at easy readability or intuitive usability. The amount of keystrokes required to pull down a customer in VIPR (our customer intake software) is steadily growing as they add features that don't add value. Those additional 7-10 seconds per customer, multiplied by each employee across the entire agency, per day? They add up. But Baltimore doesn't care.
That's the even bigger problem. Baltimore doesn't care.
I want to do my job and help people. I want to be proud of this agency, because I believe in its mission 100% in my heart and soul. But here I am, a few short years from retirement, and I'm looking for the door, because leadership has no answers and doesn't seem motivated to find any.
Time to post excuses it seems.
Reasons are not excuses.
8:07 am is spot on. If you don’t work for the agency, you can’t even begin to imagine how inefficient our processes are in practice.
And to the person that posted “excuses”…same goes for the claimants right?
Oh I can’t work because of this or that…excuses? Just suck it up and deal with it…right?
Hope you’re not a rep.
@8:19
I'll take excuses over silence, which is usually the response from anyone in the administration.
anon@3:27am,
Get real. Nobody at SSA has the least concern whatsoever whether somebody has a lawyer or not. The simple fact of the matter is that SSA doesn't handle anybody's claim any differently or any faster whether they are legally represented or not. The same process applies for ALL claimants for benefits.
Truthfully, lawyers are just as helpless as claimants within the current system, as they have little power whatsoever to actually accomplish anything on their own. That isn't saying anything bad about the lawyers that handle social security cases, only that they are stuck trying to navigate a system with no actual way to make the agency listen to them.
In the case that you describe, some poorly trained agency employee (which is what the agency gets today since upper management insists on training employees using video on demand and doesn't even bother to give them training manuals) made a stupid ass mistake.
When it was pointed out and someone was handed the stupid sign, they managed to fix it. While the lawyer obviously helped in the case you describe, it didn't get fixed because anybody was in any way bothered by the "threat" of an attorney.
@ 6:40 Good points.
You are right maybe at the initial and DDS level not caring about having an attorney. But at the OHO level?
Most ALJs welcome a seasons SSD/SSI rep to help develop the record. Remember, it is the SSA's duty to properly develop the record not a claimant or rep. It is the claimant's burden to prove disability with 1 page of medical record or 1,0000 pages.
Reps have been trying to tell this to the SSA since I started in this game in 2006. The collection of medical records is vastly different with an unrepped claimant.
My only problem is claimants give up the right to ever really call to the SSA once a rep is listed. Not sure exactly how this is legal. Claimants calling to check status would ease the burden of reps. The hardest part of this legal work is calling doctors to get medical records and waiting on the phone to call the SSA. Other than that, it is a pretty simple legal process.
I got hired as a BA in September and am already applying elsewhere. The workload is unrealistic, I hate the actual work, the systems we use are older than I am, and I feel I was tricked into the job. I would not have taken the position if I had know what it was, but SSA obfuscated the nature of the job until we had actually started.
Not just at FO. I'm at a big regional hq and everything we do is through PCOM as well.
Lol ok. How about you go try and do anytime quickly and efficiently through PCOM if it's just an excuse?
It is not an excuse to point out SSA's reliance on extremely inefficient and outdated IT infrastructure. If a switch could flipped that modernized all back end infrasture and made it easier for attorneys and claiamnt's to electonrically submit forms that could be auto-processed, it would instantly eliminate at least 50% of the service related issues, and lessen the need for more untrained employees that aren't really useful. Improvement to IT and software systems should be a priority focus for improving both public service and job satisfaction for employees. As an attorney representative I welcome these critiques and explanations, as it gives me more insight into what the problem actually is.
Why would anyone stay? It says a lot about why the agency is the way it is.
I see the writing on the wall. The agency is losing seasoned employees and new hires don't stay. The job has gotten too complicated and the micro management is beyond anything I have ever seen. I find that I spend more time answering to pop ups everyday. I can't do front desk work and be a claims rep and be proficient. I see dark times ahead for this agency and it's staffing. Congress needs a field trip to the field offices.
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