According to government employees, excellent benefits are one of the perks that attracts them to work for the government. Even though government salaries are somewhat less than the private sector, the small fiscal variation is simply balanced by other things like job security, flexibility and improvement prospects.
An employee who works full time for the federal government gets various benefits including life insurance, tuition assistance, medical and dental coverage, vacation, life insurance, sick leave, and retirement benefits. Government employees who have retired recently get twice the pension when compared to their counterparts in the private sector. Typically, the government pension plan is more liberal.
In a government job, you get more flexibility when it comes to schedules and working from the home. As per CDW Government study, telework adoption in the federal government outnumbers the private sector. Almost 44 percent of the federal employees had the alternative of telework, while in the private sector only 15 percent of the employees enjoy this luxury.
An article in the Washington Post on September 2007 talks about how federal agencies are gradually offering bonuses to hire and retain employees for some key positions. The Office of Personnel Management presented a report to the Congress which describes that around 47 government agencies were rewarded $140 million in bonuses to hire, preserve and transfer employees in 2006. Agencies including Agriculture, Commerce Defense, and Veterans Affairs offered such incentives to their employees. As per the report, average recruitment bonus was around $8,000 while incentives given to retain employees was almost $5,000, and the relocation incentive was around $11,500.
Most federal government employees prefer government jobs because these jobs are secure. The Federal government is very stable and even if they reorganize and remove jobs, then every attempt was made to relocate the affected employees. It is ultimately a secure job.
Like employees working for big corporate organizations, government employees also complain about the amount of red tape they come across. A physician working at the Department of Veterans Affairs complains that the medical center is always in pressure of providing excellent professional care within a limited budget. They also have to maintain the standards, highest quality care and unmotivated bureaucracy. At times, working for the government may be political. According to some insiders, many times politics overpower the duty of the agency. Other general complaint about government employment is the difficulty involved in getting promoted due to various reasons.