Morale is Bleak at Homeland Security Department

The Department of Homeland Security is the agency responsible for protecting us against terrorism and helping us respond to natural disasters. But a new survey of employees at the Department suggests employees are suffering from very low morale.

The New York Times’ David E. Rosenbaum is reporting that the survey by an outside research organization found that only 12 percent of the 10,000 employees surveyed said they felt strongly they were “encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things.”

Similarly, only three percent felt they were confident personnel decisions were “based on merit,” Rosenbaum says, and just four percent were sure that “creativity and innovation are rewarded.”

The survey “shows there is something fundamentally wrong at the organization,” Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told Rosenbaum. “If you were on the board of directors of a company and you got results like this, you would lean on the managers to fix the problem or get rid of them.”

Homeland Security spokesperson Russ Knocke told Rosenbaum the morale problems are a result of the fact that the formation of the DHS “was a merger of 22 agencies, a start-up all at once, and a number of the agencies experienced some growing pains the first couple of years.”

To read the full article, click here: http://www.helenair.com/articles/2005/10/16/national/a03101605_02.txt