Social Security has released a recording of an interview of Martin O'Malley, Commissioner of Social Security, by Jeffrey Buckner, Social Security's Assistant Deputy Commissioner for the Office of Communications. You can listen to the audio or read a transcript. Here's a little snippet: "The common sense is, you are not going to have satisfied customers if you have miserable and overworked employees."
Apr 19, 2024
Interview With Commissioner
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In the meantime, he continues to maintain the same unattainable expectations on remaining staff in an effort to ensure they continue to get the work done despite being massively shorthanded, causing them to continue leaving at a faster rate than the hiring of new staff.
I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that this guy is so slimy (or inept?), or the fact that he apparently presumes we’re all too stupid to see the inconsistency between his words and actions?
This is currently how a lot of employees feel. So far things have mostly been lip service. I do understand that big government agencies are slow to change, by their nature. Lots of things involve legal checks and public registry and the rest of the bureaucratic red tape, but there are small quality of life changes he could make for employees that he has the power to just…change…and yet, nothing. I just switched agencies so no longer with the sinking ship that is SSA but I hope he stops the bleeding and rights the ship. Hes got a long battle ahead of him.
You made the right call leaving. It’s basically indistinguishable from the era of pre-pandemic Saul at the helm with Terry Gruber at his right hand running OHO. Except at least those two didn’t try to gaslight us and pretend they were doing anything but being unreasonable fascists.
I wonder how many surprise office visits the commissioner has done in which he talked exclusively to claims and service representatives. Talking to management is equivalent to talking to the captain of the Titanic!
I don’t know what all the pessimism is about. The guy is trying to pull the Agency out of the abyss. He’s made more rapid quick changes to help staff in 3 months than I’ve seen in 14 years. He challenges Congress to fund the Agency in a meaningful and honest way. Maybe he’ll fail but major kudos for his efforts thus far.
The agency does not need “kudos” but rather results. The commissioner needs to spread the word to the public by doing interviews and informing them that major reforms are needed before benefit cuts and office closing take place.
He’s tinkered with a few extremely minor things at the margins that I’m sure have spared a few claims reps from a sigh or two, but I’m hard pressed to think of anything meaningful or significant he’s actually done to help staff and improve morale. Can you identify even one?
Things are about to get a lot worse. We’ve been informed that phones now take priority over in person service. So when we go on break even lunch, the public is left waiting until we return from our break. I work in a small office. Our wait times are already typically an hour so imagine waiting that long then having to wait until we return from break. We were told the commissioner does not care about wait times in the lobby. We need to focus on the phones. This is ridiculous!
People complained when Saul was Commissioner because he wanted changes to telework, yet O’Malley is barely there and calling people back in when they had a union agreement for FT telework till Oct 2025.
@457 - I did not give the agency kudos, I gave him kudos for his own personal efforts at changing the agency so far.
The commissioner is playing Whac-A-Mole with the workloads. Why does a person calling an office take priority over a person who took the time to visit the office and has been in the waiting area for ninety minutes? Maybe SSA is preparing the public for a future of more office closing and most of the workloads are done over the phone or through the internet.
Just curious. How many of you watch the videos he puts out every few days? The baseball analogies and dramatic cuts and music are killing me. But there are so many I actually have an outlook rule to file them for me since I don’t have time to sit through 2-3 of those per week. Just curious.
From what field office managers hear, the upper SESers are busy trying to prevent O’Malley from doing “stupid” things… as the old saying goes, when you have one finger pointing at someone, there are three pointing back at you. O’Malley needs to send some of those folks to the Tiger Team… At least O’Malley is trying…Might be beneficial for the SESers to take note because what they are doing is not working.
@10:42am,
Will never happen. I never ever spoke to a single SESer that wasn't more concerned with their executive bonuses, Friday/weekend golf games, and toeing the line of their political patrons than actually attempting to accomplish meaningful change at SSA.
Truly, O'Malley doesn't know enough about the agency and thus lacks the institutional knowledge to recognize that those same SESers and their minions are blowing smoke up his rear orifice.
As to his vaunted "visits" to FOs, how much do you want to bet that as often as possible he was directed to the arse-kisser employees that management wanted him to speak to while simultaneously directing him away from the "troublemaker" employees who could have told him what really needs to change?
Have to say, I am not one bit sorry that I retired in January.
Nothing of substance is going to be allowed to change. It never has.
6:25 Those who had full time telework should not have had that continued, while other SSA employees were called back to the office. It's good that the favoritism ended for the high grade employees , the management central office employees, they now have to come into the office like the rest of us.
I give O'Malley credit for ending that favoritism and telling those people that they are not better than front line employees, insofar as their telework privileges are concerned.
Making the staff in HQ more unhappy isn’t actually doing anything meaningful to improve morale in the field. If it’s brought you joy, you might want to consider therapy, as that’s a troubling sign.
4:53. It has nothing to do with favoritism. The office employees were getting the work done timely and accurately. They are not front line employees, and now with gas prices close to $4 at headquarters, no need to go in. Honestly more work is done by telework, less camaraderie, which detracts from working. Glad I’m retired.
@4:53 - When the Softphone first deployed, those of us in HQ tried our best to make the case for expanded telework, including for front line folks. Money and management hesitation prevented expanded deployment of the Softphone but we jumped through every hoop we could to make it as expansive as possible including renegotiating pricing and deployment methodology with Avaya to get the Softphone in as many hands as we could. Precisely because having the Softphone bolstered the case for expanding telework.
When COVID hit, those of us in HQ fought and in some cases worked 12-14 hour days to make sure front line workers and folks supporting hearings had the infrastructure they needed to work from home full time because trust me, upper management were TRYING their best to keep front line folks in the office. If it hadn't been for those same HQ people you're vilifying you and others might have been working throughout COVID in person with all the literal risk to health that comes with that.
To this day, HQ staff are CONSTANTLY making the argument of expanding telework for everyone including you guys. To turn around and celebrate HQ folks having to return to office because public facing staff had to return is a sad, crabs in a barrel way to live life.
Unfortunately, if you have a job facing the public in person, there's only so much that can be done other than pushing yourself to move up and out of that role but to argue "I have to come in, so should you" is a self-defeating and short sighted argument to make.
4:53 apparently is unaware that large swaths of very "favorite" employees continue to telework full-time. ALJs are the king of the SSA jungle and they still have full-time telework. Same with AAJs, and everyone at OHO/OAO. So 4:53 is asleep behind the wheel and doesn't realize what is going on in his own agency.
To everyone else who can cobble together more than a few thoughts, O'Malley is a garrulous windbag. He preaches frontlines and budget, but is spending millions to reopen a shuttered Seattle RO to force a bunch of people who don't want to go back into the office. He's paying out big bucks in supplies, transit and everything else. Why not save all those dollars and keep people home, and instead bump the pay of every field office worker and offer generous overtime to work down the 1-800 number and everything else?
For the bajillionth time, there is a presidential mandate to put people back into the office, and the Comr is complying like every other affected agency. It doesn't matter if it is stupid or we don't have space, and this is economic and politically motivated "concern" about telework. All the metrics reflect more productivity and less leave with telework, there is no data suggesting otherwise.
I have met the Comr, watched all his congressional testimony, and see the biweekly products of his work. I was not a fan previously, but holy shit is he moving at the speed of light to fix things; more optimistic about institutional change than in 20ish years of my (non-managerial) career. I can absolutely assure the commentariat that he has met with angry employees, he has fixed individual problems brought to his attention, and he is fixing internal problems, like the abysmal RA process, with unprecedented speed for a bureaucracy. He is not a fan of the structure of this work, his criticism of the systems is fair, and he is honest about his limitations. I won't stump for him, but employees expected this sort of thing from Kilolo given her resume and did not get the level of compassion her career projects. Did not expect this guy to be the one doing 18-hour days and talking to actual employees in cubes doing work without a gun to their heads.
SES is the problem, individual management is the problem, and the corps of top-level brass who cannot wait to replace the humans with bots because slavery is difficult to manage when people have the ability to say no. These are the people he called "monsters" in public hearings and that deserves a round of applause for keeping it 100% in a way no other Comr has as long as I have been alive. These monsters don't care who they hurt as long as they get the numbers they want and keep the drama undercover so congress doesn't get angry and cut our funding or direct counterproductive things to address backlogs. If the public thinks it looks nuts from their perspective, the things this agency has done to people secretly would stupefy and make them wanna throw the whole thing into the dumpster. Y'all reps know this firsthand and thank you for protecting the public from SSA.
This Comr has done more helpful things in like 4 months than any other exec did to dismantle the agency in years. The difference is the attitude and the trend.
Every other exec has worked hard to reduce backlogs by making the programs more difficult to get through, qualify for, and access because it saves money and time. If people die in the middle of a claim, maybe dismissal and off the docket. If fewer people file claims, fantastic, that's less money and less work. If treating clinicians can be disregarded over the opinion of a random Ed.D from University of Internet who can't get another job because of all the ethics claims he racked up allegedly reviews an entire file in 30 minutes for $150, more denials, less money, less work. If the DOT says submarine brush salesman is a job, oops can't fix it cause law says use it, more denials, less work. If the address management system sucks, or the public sends mail to a black hole, and the public doesn't get notified of whatever, then they can't respond, oops they missed the deadline and that's less money, less work. If the hold time is 35 minutes on the phone, then people drop the call, awesome cause less money, less work etc. forever.
This Comr calls that attitude "unconscionable" and moves in the direction of the interests of the public and employees, and that is a new sensation if you actually do this work and have been paying attention since Shalala. I'm not sure how y'all aren't clocking this if you have been reading and listening. It's still early enough to be disappointed, but I'm hoping the sword comes for management and progress is imminent given this trend.
What metrics point to .increased productivity under telework? Just anecdotal but SSA has been a bigger mess since telework. I doubt many of my fellow attorneys will agree with increased productivity the last 4 years
4:37. I’m not talking front line employee metrics, I’m talking analysts in an office at HQ. I know I felt compelled to do more work while teleworking (I always had great work ethics in my 41+ years). Not enough cubes on core days for everyone now. Glad I’m retired.
@4:37 - I can't speak for the other side of SSA but in OHO, in the face of a global pandemic and the stressors that brought onto everyone's lives...
We got our internal folks up and running remotely, introduced or expanded new hearing modalities and reduced our backlog at a quicker pace than prior to the pandemic.
Most importantly, most of that was on the fly, by the seat of our pants using systems that were not inherently designed to support that and not part of some well-rehearsed and refined process built up over years of experience and continuously improved engineering. It was the result of our best folks working 14-16 hour days figuring out how and where to push the limits of our systems and have it work consistently and securely.
- We need to spin up telephone hearings.
- OK, how do we get everyone on the line at the same time?
- Conference Bridge!
- Let's test it out.
- Can't use our conference bridges because they are not secure enough to protect claimant PII, back to the drawing board.
- Have the VHR conference people in!
- The phone system only allows someone to conference in 4, maybe 5 people max so lets figure out how we manage that.
- Oh, and by the way the phone system is 15 years old and not designed to support 50k people teleworking and 2000 people conferencing in 4 or 5 people at a time so how do we work around that?
- How's the VHR going to record the hearing, we don't have remote DRAP
- Who's going to be the VHR because contract VHR's don't have agency laptops or remote DRAP.
- What about the Judge or the VHR that has dial up speed internet because of their physical location?
- What about the fact that public phone companies keep marking our outbound calls as possible spam and claimants don't answer the phone when we're trying to conference them into a hearing?
- How long can headset batteries last during back to back hearings?
- What about the fact that half of this office is out sick this week?
- We need another VHR for a hearing, do we sacrifice answering the front desk phone or sacrifice the hearing?
- Remember 12 years ago when we let offices opt to not have a call queue and instead just roll unanswered calls to VM, yeah, that's not making people too happy now 12 years after the fact in the middle of a pandemic when call volumes are triple what they used to be, but it would take $60k and 8 months PER OFFICE to change it now so....
This was literally one meeting of thousands trying to sort through large scale issues on the fly while also trying to keep workloads moving.
I'm sure there were hiccups and individual results may vary because of a million variables but to act like OHO's navigation of the pandemic wasn't the sign of a massive increase in productivity is not really accurate when you factor in the totality of the situation.
Well, if he's using the baseball analogies, how about "working the count...," "get 'em on, get 'em over, get 'em in." You can't just go up to the plate swinging for the fences.
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