Agency’s morale survey is not pretty

The top brass at the state Department of Social Services weren’t eager to release the results of a consultant’s survey of DSS employees’ morale last October when a worker requested the document, but they finally handed it over last month after the worker, tired of waiting, filed a complaint with the Freedom of Information Commission in May.

The July 2019 snapshot of employee sentiment in three key divisions of DSS — Health Services, Information Technology, and Quality Assurance — is mixed, to put it mildly, and isn’t pretty in a number of ways.

Anonymous respondents decried “a culture…of deceit, hypocrisy [and] favoritism,” for example, or said, “I am trying so hard to get out of this toxic environment.”

The survey has caused enough of a stir that DSS Commissioner Deidre Gifford emailed the three divisions’ staffs June 22 to explain that the “the results were released to an individual under [an FOI] request,” and that survey is “of limited use because of its age” (it’s a year old, even though it would have been only three months old if released when it was first requested).

But the commissioner also acknowledged “the importance of understanding the workplace climate at DSS” and said “we will continue to work with” the heads of the three divisions “and all of you, to lead this organization through an extraordinary time.” And she pointed out “[t]his survey, while dated, showed areas of strength such as coworkers and organizational leadership.”

The DSS employee who persisted in her effort to obtain the release of the survey results last month was Marcia Benson, a unionized administrator who oversaw enrollment of health providers until she retired at the end of June.

Gifford has been busy during the coronavirus pandemic. Gov. Ned Lamont made her acting commissioner of the Department of Public Health in May when he removed Renee Coleman-Mitchell as head of that agency. Running DSS, by itself, is a big job as it serves about one million Connecticut residents through programs, including Medicaid health coverage for low-income persons, public assistance formerly known as welfare and food stamps, and protective services for the elderly.

However, after the release last month of the survey results, Gifford and other top administrators responded by convening “town hall meetings” with employees in the three affected divisions. She and other managers said in a July 15 email that “overwhelming staff participation … affirms that we are all interested and committed to moving our agency forward in constructive ways,” and “[i]t is