NASA People REALLY Like To Work At NASA
NASA Named Best Place to Work, No. 1 for COVID-19 Response
“For the ninth consecutive year, the Partnership for Public Service has ranked NASA as the Best Place to Work in the Federal Government among large agencies and, new for 2020, has also ranked NASA No. 1 among large agencies for its response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The rankings, announced Tuesday, reflect NASA’s focus and dedication as it pursues missions, including sending humans farther into space than ever before. In 2020, the agency saw its highest employee satisfaction results since this index was developed.”
The competition from the likes of the IRS sets the bar pretty low for NASA to beat. It will be interesting to see how hardline some management takes to get everyone back on site after folks have proven for 15+ months telework still allows productive spaceflight research, operations and other tasks with contractors and vendors spread across the country.
I don’t think it will take as much pushing as you might imagine. At least in my own group, most of us are champing at the bit to get back on center, having found that the telework configuration has a significant negative effect on productivity, making everything we do about 20% harder than it should be. Add to that the erosion of a sense of being a member of a team (the ironically-named “Teams” video chat app doesn’t help) and I suspect that a lot of us are more than ready to get back to normal.
lots of folks who are on all day telecons with vendors and commercial partners spread all around may prefer the home office than the cubicle farm or sitting in a conference room tied into the telecon.
from the nasa human capital survey results that came out today :
Most employees can, and want to, continue working off-site for a large portion of their time 70% want to be off-site more than half of their time
Yeah, our work is not typical of the majority of the business done at NASA, so that may account for the difference in attitude between our group and the poll respondents.
44% want to work >80% of the time at home.
8% want to work >80% of the time at the office.
Isn’t this odd? What does it tell us?
Even with the impediments from procurement, full cost accounting, and IT rules, NASA is indeed an excellent place to be a scientist.