Staff Reports
NS&D Monitor
1/9/2015
There have been persistent rumblings of low morale at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s two-site Production Office almost from its inception in June 2012, and those concerns were apparently substantiated and underscored by the 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. It appeared, based on a drill-down of the results, that the NPO—created to oversee the combined management contract for the Y-12 and Pantex nuclear weapons plants—has the worst morale of any unit in the entire Department of Energy.
The third-level sub-agency report, which broke down the government survey according to the various units within the Department of Energy, indicated that responses from the NPO were the lowest in the agency on about half of the 80-plus survey questions. That negativity appeared to be particularly strong when federal employees in the NPO were asked about their attitudes toward management.
NNSA Says It’s Addressing Issues
The leadership of the NNSA Production Office indicated that steps are under way to address the employee concerns. In a Dec. 5 message to NPO employees, Deputy Manager Teresa Robbins said she was distributing the results for the employees’ “review and reflection.” Robbins said: “I’m not positive when the survey was taken but I believe it probably reflects a more pessimistic time when we were not allowed to hire, travel, or participate in training due to our very limited program direction funding. However, we are going to own the results as stated in the survey.”
While Robbins indicated the 2014 results were something of a surprise, there were reports of similar results in 2013 and 2012 surveys and that efforts to address them in the past—such as special employee committees—had not significantly changed the bottom line. In her memo to employees, Robbins asked them to volunteer for teams to correct the problems. She said the executive leadership team at the NNSA’s Production Office “takes the results of this survey very seriously.”
When the NPO was asked about the negative response, Robbins said in a statement that the “survey results reflect the growing pains of establishing a new and unique organization with a diverse and challenging mission across a geographically separated organization. Since the survey was taken in June 2014, we have filled three key management positions with permanent selections to address one of the key employee concerns. Our goal is to address the survey results and to ultimately make NPO one of the best places to work in the NNSA complex. This will be accomplished through an employee led effort in the federal workforce at Pantex and Y-12.” The NPO currently consists of 115 employees. According to the report, 66 employees at the NNSA Production Office participated in the survey.
