Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
10/9/2015
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) faces employee morale, recruitment, and retention challenges in the next year, according to a report released earlier this month by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General’s Office (IG). The board, though, has increased its performance on staff engagement significantly, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said this week in its fiscal 2015 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.
The IG report highlights four categories of “management and performance challenges” that will require program improvements in fiscal 2016: organizational culture, management of internal infrastructure security, human capital management, and internal administrative controls. It cites a September 2015 culture and climate survey that revealed employees “lack a sense of pride in DNFSB and personal accomplishment in their work” and a 2014 federal employee survey that “showed a need to improve staff views of leadership and leadership honesty and integrity.”
The September survey also found that employees do not think DNFSB is “attracting and retaining the right talent.” Thirty-eight percent of employees surveyed said they plan to leave DNFSB in the next year and 16 percent of the organization’s technical staff is eligible for retirement, the IG said. It also cited a 2013 performance report that found “the combination of an aging workforce and high demand for experienced scientists and engineers by other organizations will remain a challenge” for the agency that monitors health and safety at Department of Energy defense nuclear sites.
The IG noted weaknesses in DNFSB’s information systems security program that were revealed in a July 2015 audit, particularly lack of continuous monitoring and inadequate oversight from contractors. The report said these shortcomings, in light of recent classified information security violations by government employees and contractors, place the organization’s information systems at risk from foreign intelligence and insider threats. It also identified “a lack of formal controls in [DNFSB’s] technical operations,” citing audits that found inadequate internal controls in the agency’s purchase and travel card programs. The IG is auditing DNFSB’s information security program and will in fiscal 2016 begin auditing the board’s change management – processes used to facilitate the implementation of a major change – and its human resources process for filling vacancies, the report says.
However, the latest OPM federal employee survey shows strong improvement in DNFSB employee engagement and job satisfaction, finding the board was one of two small agencies with the largest increase from 2014 survey results. OPM acting Director Beth Cobert lauded the improvement in a blog post, saying the DNFSB “made double-digit gains in all three indices. Its engagement score went up by 14 percentage points, its global job satisfaction score by 17 points, and its workplace inclusion index by 12 points.”
In a prepared statement DNFSB said, “Chairman [Joyce] Connery has expressed to Board staff her pride in the improvement they made as a team during FY 2015, and as well as her and her fellow Board Members commitment to ensuring the agency builds on that foundation of continued success moving forward.”
