From the Partnership For Public Service report on Best Places to Work ranking for the Social Security Administration. (The rankings are of agencies with large workforces):
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Parts of the agency are also ranked against all federal agencies. The personnel under the Deputy Commissioner for Hearings Operations ranked 429 of 459 agencies. The personnel of Social Security's Office of Inspector General ranked 430 of 459 agencies. The personnel under the Deputy Commissioner for Operations ranked 456 of 459 agencies.
I'll take clean sweep for 1,000 Alex: What is unreasonable expectations, lack of training, managers who have never done the job and the overriding culture of Quantity is job #1, quality be damned. Are you listening Commissioner?
ReplyDeleteNothing new here. It’s a horrible place to work under its current conditions. I don’t see it improving very quickly. Hopefully I’m wrong but unless you work there, it’s hard to imagine how bad it actually is right now.
ReplyDeleteThe decline to correlate with some specific people's rise to leadership. And one of those people is no longer around, but no one has yet tries to undo the damage she left in her wake. My brothers and sisters in operations and OHO know who I’m talking about.
ReplyDelete@11:21am,
ReplyDeleteExactly. And, yet, even though she is gone there isn't anyone in CO willing to change anything she did. Why? Because the people still there think she was right all along and dismiss any and all evidence to the contrary as irrelevant. To do otherwise would force them to admit they were wrong, something they will NEVER voluntarily do.
Only way it will ever change is if O'Malley fires the lot of them. Or, if nothing else, reassigns them work more commiserate with their skills (i.e. counting spilled boxes of paperclips in bumfrack, USA).
Lot's of reasons for this, but one I haven't seen mentioned. Around 2011ish we stopped hiring via FCIP, where we got the best and brightest and transitioned to mostly hiring Sch A and VRA. Having unlimited access to hire the best and brightest suddenly transitioned to scrambling to get any warm body who reasonably fit the criteria.
ReplyDelete@4:24pm
ReplyDeleteExecutive culture at SSA for the last 20 years is to NEVER admit wrong and NEVER apologize. Ignore, gloss over, gaslight, or blameshift. I have NEVER seen an executive take responsibility for their own mess. This culture is what made it so shocking for O'Malley to take responsibility for his missteps. Bad decisions happen, and a culture of shared responsibility is promoted when a leader will own successes and failures honestly, knowing successes come from the hard work of his subordinates. Most of today's executives are far too self-serving to adopt true leadership. In their mind, successes are because of their brilliant leadership and failures are someone else's fault.
Long time employee and manager here. The downfall of the agency commenced with the loss of FCIP. That was our last decent group of hires . Those from this group that remain are the few managers and supervisors willing to to fill those important roles. My office had 27 employees and now is down to 12. Our area got a whopping 10 hires for this entire year to be divided among 25 offices . Attrition is horrible- we lose folks to other agencies including managers . Most would rather take a pay cut than stay. We have almost no overtime to get us through Sept and our regional leaders just keep pushing more and more. Everyone wants to leave. Most would leave today but when pressed leaders say “we won’t be offering early out soon”. If they did the exodus of people would be tremendous. The best part - our goals remain - no reduction in integrity work despite no one to do the work. I’m barely staffing my office most days - when I ask for help I’m told “there’s no one to help”. That same day I’m asked what I plan to do about meeting my targets. That’s the level of leadership in the agency .
ReplyDeleteWait- 2023 was last year
ReplyDeleteThe current rankings are based on last year’s FEVS results, i.e. 2023 results. The 2024 FEVS will be administered soon. Think we can make a three-peat of last place?
Delete10:02 sadly I think that is the reality we are all facing. We are staffed at 47%. Once we have people set for the day for reception and phones we have only a couple left to do any appointments. Let alone process the onslaught of iClaims, program integrity, ad hoc etc. we are just chasing one fire to let 5-others popup. Yet there is “no help” available. And it seems each week we have 2-3 meetings or reports to tell us what we are not doing. Real demoralizing.
ReplyDeleteIt seems every special Interest and lobby has more pull with the agency than the employees themselves. I think O’Malley is trying to balance that’s but still has lots of work to do and institutional resistance to break down. The Electronic Signatures is the greatest current-day example. All we are doing is hurting claimants. We don’t even have a definition of what an electronic signature is which leads to disparities all across the country. Even neighboring offices. Either accept the signatures or don’t. But stop the current nonsense until you can put together a policy and system that works. Having employees chase our tails trying to track down claimants to fully take a claim that was already done online because we don’t have acceptable signature which means we must retake the claim in order to attest it. No time has been saved. Congress’ infinite wisdom seconding that SSA will weather the Baby Boom with iClaims was the biggest lie ever told.
ReplyDeleteThe agency has not been truthful with the public or Congress about the cost of doing business. If the Program Integrity money funds x# of employees then there should be x# employees doing nothing but program integrity work. If 1/3 of all FO operations was nothing but RZs and CDRs I bet Congress would have been crushed by the pressure of their Constituents who are unhappy about service. But instead the agency took a blind eye and just said do what you want with staffing as long as you get the work done. Well newsflash the House of Cards has collapsed and we are paying for the ignorance of those staffing decisions. Combined with a lack of leadership with budgetary offense and we’ve allowed Congress to run us into the ground because Leadership’s “we can still get it done” mentality is proving that we can no longer do that.
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ReplyDeleteWay too much negativity here. I am an SSA employee and I am quite happy with my job. I feel that my work is valuable and I am serving the public well.
SSA Employees who are unhappy, have more of an incentive to respond to these surveys: this skews the results.
I would gather that you are either new or in management or perhaps an ALJ, a 13 or higher or a favored son/daughter. I have been with this Agency for almost 30 years and I have seen it go from being all about the claimants to the claimants being an after thought. I am disgusted by what it has become. Rank and file employees are not treated well...I am out the door in a few short months.
DeleteHappiest employees in the agency are the Appeals Officers - all they do is click "Agree" (to deny) - 10 cases a day, do a "disagree" now and then to make it look like they're actually paying attention, and call it a day. Easiest, low stress job in the agency - and a GS14.
ReplyDelete@9:15am,
ReplyDeleteMaybe you love your job so much because it allows you to be reading and posting to this blog at a time of day when you should be actually working in that job you love some much?
Secondly, the agency hasn't fared any better in the annual FEVS surveys the last few years. And this is with upper management beating the drum and pestering employees to participate in hopes of escaping the embarrassment of their basement survey ratings the last few years.
ReplyDeleteLike most SSA employees I'm quite happy with my job, and enjoy serving the public. The agency is doing well, all things considered, and treating employees well too.
I usually don't fill out the FEVS survey but this time I will.
The whiners, the , find a reason to complain about SSA brigade , have been dominating these surveys, and skewing the results.
Because many of the satisfied and happy employees have not bothered filling them out . Also we are too busy doing our jobs.
A positive attitude helps a lot, in doing a good job for the agency.
Many of the T2 claims specialists are new in my office. They don't have the knowledge that the priority is getting claims to DDS and processing RSI claims. We went a year without doing any CDRs and the world didn't stop. Management may say that CDRs are top priority but I pay the people who filed claims first. Local management's emphasis on CDRs, waivers, etc that are really low priority is so frustrating.They don't realize that people are waiting to be paid. The public usually doesn't scream over taking more time for a CDR or a waiver but they do and should scream about slow processing times when SSA has everything to process the claim. I was taught way back in the 80s to do whatever is needed to process/pay claims and that other work was not as urgent.
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