Fed survey: Are you happy?

President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget has a whimsical plan to survey government workers about their job satisfaction. It also wants to evaluate the well-being of enrollees in the federal health insurance program.

It's hard to believe that this item is in a most-serious budget proposal, the biggest in history and the one that would drive the deficit to new heights. But Government Executive reports the Obama administration will administer the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey annually, instead of every other year, and will increase the number of employees who receive the questionnaire.

"Results will be reported so they can be used by agency leadership to inform management decisions," the budget document said.

The Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management will study the results to "identify promising practices to promote more broadly for government-wide improvement."

That's not all. To help make the data more useful for managers, the administration plans to create an online database of workforce statistics similar to the Federal IT Dashboard that keeps track of government technology projects.  

We'd like to give the Obama administration a nod right now for thinking about government employees, but in this critical time it seems to us that this is an issue that could be left at the starting gate until far more serious issues are solved, such as the nation's high unemployment rate and the vulnerability of federal IT systems to be hacked and the future.

What do you think? Let us know.

For more on the worker happiness survey:
- see this Government Executive article

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