Do men and women working for the federal government have different perceptions of their jobs and work environments?

This is one of the questions that my organization, the Partnership for Public Service, set out to answer in Gender Gaps and Racial/Ethnic Divides , a new Best Places to Work in the Federal Government analysis, based on data from the Office of Personnel Management's 2011 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

After years of being told to “do more with less” using the latest management fads – think Total Quality Management or Reinventing Government – how do you convince a cynical workforce that change is really necessary? - Federal Supervisor, U.S. Department of Education

To some public servants, the call to do even more with even less may sound all too familiar. It’s especially difficult if your employees see it as a call to work even harder to achieve the same results with fewer resources. The problem may be that they are working as hard as they can, and if so, we need to change what we ask of them.

The steady negative drumbeat regarding government appears to be taking its toll on student attitudes toward federal service.

Working with the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), my organization – the Partnership for Public Service – analyzed a survey of more than 35,000 students from nearly 600 colleges and universities, asking about everything from their expectations about their first job to whether they would consider a career in public service. The results were troubling.

This week we have a question about younger folks in the workplace:

How do I motivate millennials who believe they know everything? - Federal supervisor

To many generation X and baby boomer supervisors, the millennial generation can seem like a mystery to manage. It’s a challenge to live up to the expectations they’ve developed having been reared in an online, on-demand world.

While there are certainly social and cultural differences among millennials and other generations, I’m concerned that we too often fall into stereotypes that cause us to focus on solving the wrong problems.

Earlier this week, President Obama used his annual State of Union address to ask Congress for “the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our government is leaner, quicker and more responsive to the needs of the American people.”

This was in part a reference to a recent proposal unveiled by Obama to merge six agencies into a new department that would encompass the business and trade functions of the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade and Development Agency. The plan also called for moving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the Commerce Department to the Interior Department.