USA 
United Kingdom
The Government Accountability Office has criticized HR practices at the Transportation Security Administration, highlighting favoritism, understaffing and poor performance management as reasons for ongoing employee disengagement.
The 75-page report, released on February 28, finds that whilst employee engagement did improve by four percentage points from 2022 to 2023, thanks in part to a new personnel system that allowed an agency-wide 30% pay increase in July 2023, TSA continues to have among the poorest disengagement scores across the federal government.
TSA, which employs almost 50,000 transport security officers (TSOs), has previously identified “commit to our people” as one of its top three priorities central to its security mission, emphasizing the need to improve engagement amongst its workforce.
In 2022, it ranked 427 out of 432 federal government subcomponent agencies in the Partnership for Public Service’s “Best Places to Work.” It measures employee engagement with its Employee Engagement Index, which uses 15 questions to measure the conditions conducive to engagement.
GAO has identified five core drivers of employee engagement at TSA: managing and recognizing performance, providing opportunities for career development, supporting work-life balance, demonstrating responsiveness to input, and ensuring communication from management.
The report acknowledges TSA has taken actions to address all five key drivers. Although small, engagement did increase from 2022 to 2023 after dropping three percentage points from 2020 to 2022. However, GAO notes the actions have barely scratched the surface.
“While TSA has identified issues that negatively affected employee engagement, they have not consistently identified the root causes of these issues or taken steps to fully address them,” GAO says. “As a result, low engagement remains. For example, our interviews with TSOs analysis of TSA survey results found that dissatisfaction persists among TSOs regarding how TSA manages and recognizes employee performance.”
The report spotlights ongoing and substantial issues with work-life balance as a major driver of disengagement among TSA employees. GAO interviewed senior TSA leadership at five airports. At four airports, leaders cited limited staff as a core barrier to work-life balance, with TSOs at one airport stating that “mandatory overtime led to burnout.”
In the report, GAO notes an observation from TSA’s Human Capital Advisory Group that TSOs “can be required to work overtime due to understaffing, which can lead to a potential increase in attrition.”
It also includes criticism from National Advisory Council representatives that TSOs often have unpredictable work schedules, causing difficulties with securing childcare. “They explained that officers’ work schedules changed when, for example, airlines change their flight schedules. Additionally, senior leadership at one airport stated that TSOs who are parents can have trouble securing childcare that works with their shift schedule.”
TSOs at four of the five surveyed airports also highlighted challenges for employees taking annual leave, including having to request leave months ahead of time and new hires being unable to take leave over the summer.
GAO also writes that TSA leadership and management are making insufficient efforts to act on feedback from workers. The report notes that TSOs at three airports stated their feedback was not acted upon. There are also issues with employees feeling comfortable sharing feedback.
“An employee group representative at one airport stated that some TSOs were reluctant to give supervisors feedback because they worried about retaliation,” GAO says. “TSOs at two airports also told us that some employees were reluctant to give feedback to their supervisors because of privacy concerns.”
Employees also say TSA recognition and award programs continue to lack commitment, transparency, and integrity from leaders, managers, and supervisors. This includes claims of favoritism due to ineffective intervention from the TSA. “The actions TSA has taken—a one-hour training course for supervisors and two programs intended to recognize top performers—did not fully address the challenges that we and TSA identified regarding inconsistent application of the performance management process.”
GSA highlights that the training course does not address “subjective or uninformed performance appraisals.”
Poor communication is also driving issues with disengagement and a disconnect between employees and leadership. According to the GSA, many TSA employees lack confidence in their understanding of important workplace issues.
“43 Representatives from employee groups, senior leadership, and TSOs we met with at all five airports described challenges with communication from management,” the report finds. “National Advisory Council representatives said that TSOs often did not receive communication from TSA headquarters because they did not have time during their workday to access their work email, which is TSA’s primary way of communicating with employees.”
GAO makes nine recommendations in total, advising the TSA to identify the root causes of key drivers of disengagement including career development, communication, and work-life balance; to identify and implement actions to address these root causes; and to track and monitor the progress of any actions taken.
