From: DCOSent: Friday, September 16, 2022 11:19 AMTo:
Subject: DCO Broadcast: Improving Workplace MoraleA Message to All DCO EmployeesLast November, many of you participated in the 2021 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, or FEVS. In reviewing the results, we have learned that in the current environment, staying engaged in your work is difficult and morale has dipped. As you learned in a recent Commissioner’s Broadcast, the agency went from being one of the top five best agencies to work in, to becoming 15 out of 17 among large federal agencies. I have since been working with your regional executives and senior leadership to begin rebuilding our morale and job satisfaction, starting with increased opportunities for engagement between you and your leadership. Beyond this message, I would like to talk with you directly, so I invite you to view my video message.In the days following this message, you can expect your leaders and management to begin scheduling meetings with you. In the next couple of months, I hope that you take the opportunity to share your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions. We are here to listen, and I encourage you to continue to engage. I want our workplace to be one that you are proud of, and look forward to participating in every day.Thank you for your commitment to our Agency and to the American public.Grace M. KimDeputy Commissioner for Operations
I don’t have the video. cth
27 comments:
Grace Kim, building morale, job satisfaction?
Six words I never thought I'd hear in the same sentence. So, more useless, non-productive meetings with managers who don't listen to anything they're told, lecturing us about how great our jobs are.
Sounds like a winner to me!
I can't wait for mine.
The beatings will continue until morale improves....
Actions speak louder than words. Grace and her team are going to have to step it up. Produce positive change instead of talk about it. Troubling for employees to believe they need meetings to learn about the problems in social security.
This is such a tone deaf response. To think that the way to increase morale is to talk about it with the people mostly responsible for the poor morale is a joke. The issues are simple: there is more work than people available to do the work. Pay and benefits are stale. And many people who sign up for this job truly want to help the public but they can’t when they spend all day answering phone calls and faxing papers into the e folder.
It’s nice that telework is continuing as is until March 2023, but that doesn’t address all the other issues. I believe this email is not going to change anything and may make it worse.
Just lip service. Morale has been deteriorating for years. This isn’t just due to the pandemic although that had a definite accelerating effect.
My morale went way up the day I quit.
I am sure they will look at those results, spend months in meetings, finally select a committee to study the negative responses and formulate a plan that includes added duties and responsibilities. All of this will take so long the next FEVS survey will already be out showing we dropped to 16 out of 17.
Morale would possibly improve with fewer meetings, less contact with managers, and far fewer changes of direction in both policy and procedure. For instance, pick one way to handle a case type or task - say, dismissals - and stick to it. For another, telework has worked for many and not for others, so let each of us select the schedule that works best for us, provided it is consistent with actual program needs and not managers' need to lay eyes on us to believe we are working. Allow for time to think through complicated tasks, which are not accompanied by keystrokes. Stop changing things for sport. Stop changing the software, from programs that are almost bulletproof to programs that have been in testing for years and still don't work consistently.
Let me do my job, and get out of my way. If I need help from a manager, I can ask for it.
Managers in the field are exhausted and tired of having their time wasted on meetings the are meaningless. If upper management would provide one diversity training instead of making this and communication with employees their sole focus, we might be able to get somewhere with public service. OHO is now making hearing offices spend untold hours on communication plans - how to communicate with employees -most of whom would like to just do their work and not have to worry about appeasing managers who now have to ask them about how they would like to be recognized etc... HQ should understand that some people do not want public recognition. Employees also get monetary awards and hopefully kudos from their supervisors... SSA has devolved into management training classes, communicating with employees in a touchy feeling way that is not very welcome and wastes their time they could otherwise be serving the public working... then they get mad at management who has to ask them why they did not get enough work done -
If HQ and Regional Offices want to communicate they would stop being hypocrites, listen and let management and staff get back to work instead of doing all these silly time wasting exercises that don't seem to apply to them... The focus should be on public service...
Empty word as usual. My office lost close to 50% since March 2020. Good luck hiring and training enough people to welcome the absolute tsunami coming with reopening, recession, and long covid.
I hear you. We lost 10 of the 14 we had.
The video that came with this had mostly empty promises and a few decent ideas, such as a peer recognition program. Although I'll believe it when I see it, and see it implemented decently.
Apart from that, everyone else has already said it. The causes of poor morale are not a mystery. They are:
1. Insufficient staffing for the workloads.
2. Insufficient pay to attract or retain staff in a hot labor market.
3. Insufficient agency pull in Congress to get anything done, with an Acting Commissioner at an agency that hasn't been Cabinet level in 30 years.
4. Bloated SES ranks and a disproportionately large Headquarters contingent. When DCO has to compete with Baltimore for resources, DCO loses 10 times out of 10.
5. Lack of accountability at the senior level. Senior leadership misconduct is literally regularly making the Washington Post, and they're being punished for it with do-nothing jobs while they dry out (Gruber) or a slow-walked investigation (Ennis).
6. Inability to modernize regulations. SSI hasn't changed its resource limits since 1989. The Lump Sum Death Payment has been capped at $255 since 1954. Some of this requires Congressional action, and SSA's ability to suggest or influence legislation to do so seems nonexistent.
I saved the two most important points for last, as nobody ever seems to bring these up:
7. The cruelty inherent in SSA regs demoralizes not just the claimants and filers, but the people that have to sell this to the public. Early retirement earning penalties? 5 month waiting period for disability payments, 2 year waiting period for Medicare, even for Stage 4 cancer patients?
Grace Kim was an attorney. How is her morale tour going to improve anything when I know for a fact she's never had a morning like we get in the office, having to explain SSA timelines to people that likely will be dead before they get their first check?
We know exactly why these things are law. They're actuarial decisions, made by number crunchers that know the longer we delay by law, the more people will never have to be paid from the trust fund. Because they're dead. This takes a human toll. We know that saying no is part of our job, but shrugging and saying "I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do" is practically the institutional motto at this point.
And lastly, the big one:
8. Our IT is as underfunded and understaffed as the rest of our components, but even worse, they create products that reduce our productivity with every update. They take outdated-but-powerful programs such as MSSICS (which handles all SSI claims and post-entitlement actions), and ruin them with a prettier, much much slower, but no more capable or powerful replacement such as CCE.
Tell you what, Grace. Go sit in front of a CSR doing a change of address for a kid on SSI. I want you to start a stopwatch, and count every keystroke. It literally (literally!) takes ten minutes, over 50 screens, and 100 mouseclicks.
It didn't take that long several years ago- you have our Automations department to thank for these "improvements". CCE "upgrades" have made every T16 Claims Specialist in your agency at least 5-10% less productive on a daily basis over the last two years. Title 2 CSs are dreading the knowledge that the Baltimore clownshow will one day come for MCS (the program they use).
Number 1, insufficient staff was the reason I left. One can do more work than normal for a while, like a runner sprinting the last lap in a mile race. But one can't forever. The doing work of two full time employees with no help in sight did me in. Sure we were hiring more people who may help later. But we had to take the time to train them and half didn't last through probation before quitting or occasionally getting let go. I really enjoyed the job, helping others, when I was doing a job that was a reasonable workload. But I got burnt out and I was able to retire early.
Some work could be put off like medical CDRs, and it has been in the past. But extra funding was given to do them so they must be done, at the expense of initial claims and appeals.
This is all for show. Staff has been vocal directly and indirectly on the numerous reasons morale declined, long before the pandemic. As stated above, this is feigned shock and awe from the worst offenders. Shameful.
And in OHO the switch if from CPMS to HACPS -also more time consuming, confusing and just really frustrating ..... and did I mention that entries have to be made in both systems because OHO was not able to figure out how to move all the cases from one system to the other... another time wasting process that is less user friendly ...
@8:59. You are spot on about systems changes. Switching systems from something that worked well to something that looks better but is SO much more time consuming and cumbersome during a staffing shortage is insane. As an RO employee, the slowdown is so significant that our RC is getting briefed by all the centers today on the drop in productivity in the SSI world over the last month with this new release.
Everyone blamed telework for this issues, but the real crime is understaffing, overworking, mismanagement at the top for things like software roll outs and contract changes during a time our capability is stretched to the max, and the inability to recruit or retain the best candidates. It’s sad.
Grace Kim has to be the most inept DCO head we’ve had in the last 30 years. She’s wildly unprepared to handle her role and was much better suited to be an attorney for the agency as she was. We had issues with morale pre-pandemic. After 3 years of this group leading us, nearly everyone is checked out. You can’t fill jobs internally anymore. So yea, really looking forward this new and ineffective plan that will pull me from my work.
If anything,@8:59pm is drastically understating the productivity losses associated with CCE. In short, CCE is an unmitigated disaster of truly unimaginable proportions. The only people who don't see this is the upper level management people who greenlighted it and who don't have to use it. They just choose to remain ignorant and uninformed. To do otherwise would force them to have to do something about it, which ain't gonna happen.
At the rate they are going, they'll have to add another 5-7,000 SSI claims specialists just to be able to maintain productivity.
Or, more likely, someone is going to have to design a client side system that you can take an SSI claim in that will then automate feeding the case data into CCE (sort of like what eWork does to feed case data into that useless DCF/Disability Control File monstrosity, another kluge of a system "innovation"). Madness you say? Well, it wouldn't be necessary if SSA had even the slightest hint competent leadership at the top.
Systems "upgrades" may make it easier for the agency to collect data, but every.single.one. has made it more complicated and time consuming then previously to get the job done.
Once again, 15% reduction in staff from the halcyon days of high FEVS scores of the Astrue years with surge hiring says it all. I see lots of bashing of operations (both DCO and OHO) with no solution offered other than change. Operations does not determine agency hiring. The agency is caught in a budget created downward spiral due to Executive and Congressional inaction that make operations workloads unreasonable and leads directly to increased turnover and lower FEVS scores. I am dismayed when I see comments that ignore the most obvious reasons for the current state of affairs and focus on variables that have little to do with how we arrived here. Operations leadership, especially in DCO is dedicated and concerned about public service. One of the commenters suggested that Grace Kim sit down and watch an SSI change of address. I am pretty sure she has and I don’t think you will find an executive as dedicated or caring in the agency as she is. Again operations didn’t create this problem. They alone can’t fix it.
The bean counters are so juiced up over counting beans that they don't understand that the systems that allow them to do all this "drill down" counting is wrecking the soup. Or maybe they do because privatization is what they really want. Shameful all the way around.
I have no doubt they have concern for the public service being provided. What they don’t seem to care at all about is the burn out and mental strain they are putting on their staff.
And to top it all off they stopped issuing actual length of service certificates. They are now virtual. So after 20, 30, 40 years you get an emailed piece of nonsense. Hate to remind you but the littlest things can make a difference. Removing them shows a callous disregard for employeee service. As a manager I am still shaking me head at this decision. Employees matter!
Employee here…no we don’t matter…and that’s been made abundantly clear!
Customer service is obviously important, but the agency's upper management (post Carolyn Colvin) treats its employees like garbage. They would rather let us all start stroking out at our desks than tell Congress, as former Commissioner Colvin did, that we are going to do less with less. And it's because they're all more worried about their careers and next SES performance bonuses than the agency's mission or its employees.
If you want to know why SSA's attrition rate has exploded, look no further.
@2:21 that is a nice defense of Kim, but if she is in tune with operations why did she support telework cuts in 2019? Why hasn’t she pushed for more hiring publicly or say outright we are understaffed and desperate. I think a lot of new flexibility has happened over the last 8 months or so, but it’s a slow creep. Ive met her before and talked with her and I don’t doubt she cares but it also shows her staff and some of her ideas are out of touch with the issues.
@2:21 has it pretty close to spot on. Ultimately staffing is driving it all. When you put a system under pressure it exposes things that would have not normally been seen and it creates new problems. If a garden hose has a tiny leak it may go unnoticed but if you keep increasing the water pressure that leak gets bigger. If you increase the pressure a whole lot more you will cause new leaks or blow out a seal. Our critically low staffing levels are akin to rapidly increasing the water pressure in the garden hose. I’m not sure Grace has much responsibility for that.
Here’s where I think she could be better and where the ACOSS could be better. Setting reasonable expectations on what we we can do with current resources and committing that to everyone. Congress, employees, public.
Love him or hate him, and there are lots on both sides, that’s what Astrue did well.
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