A new report released Tuesday shows that job satisfaction among federal employees fell for the fourth consecutive year in 2014.
This year's levels fell by .9 points to 56.9 out of 100, the lowest since the group Best Places to Work launched its rankings program in 2003.
In contrast, the Hay Group found levels for private-sector employee satisfaction improved by 1.3 points to a score of 72 in 2014.
"The steady drop in employee satisfaction from 2011 to 2014 may be the result of a number of factors that have played out during the past several years," the report says. "These include sequestration, the 2013 across-the-board budget cuts; pay freezes; hiring slowdowns; numerous management missteps that garnered negative attention and criticism; and a partial government shutdown that resulted in the furlough of 850,000 employees."
However, effective leadership has the greatest influence on how employees view their workplace, followed by a match between agency mission and employee skills, and satisfaction with pay, the report found.
For the third year in a row NASA was ranked as the top large government agency to work at, with a job satisfaction rating of 74.6 out of 100. The Department of Commerce came in second with a 68.7 rating and third was the Department of State at 68.2. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took first in the mid-sized category, with a score of 82.3 and the Surface Transportation Board took first among the small agencies, with a score of 86.8.
At the lower end of the spectrum was the Department of Homeland Security, which experienced the largest decrease in satisfaction among large agencies with a drop of 2.8 points. Out of all federal agencies, the biggest satisfaction decrease was seen at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where the score fell 14.3 points.
The report was largely compiled based on federal employee viewpoint surveys administered by the Office of Personnel Management to more than 392,700 federal workers from April through June 2014.
