Measure What Matters

Last year, we postponed the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and critics were quick to claim that we at OPM did not believe in employee engagement surveys. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The truth is we don’t believe in surveys that fail to accomplish the goals for which they were designed, instead becoming public fodder for the award of vanity metrics, such as “Best Places to Work.” [Truth be told, OPM has one of those from 2011 that hangs next to the elevator banks in our lobby, begging the question of course of what has happened to use since 2011?!]

The truth is that we believe strongly in well-designed employee engagement surveys that help managers understand: (1) whether the organization is aligned around the right objectives; (2) whether employees understand those objectives and how their work contributes to them; (3) whether managers manage well – e.g., holding team members accountable, rewarding excellence, providing good career development for top performers; (4) and particularly in the case of the government, being able to protect whistleblowers without fear of reprisal.

We also believe that surveying once per year is sub-optimal. We live in a rapidly changing world where objectives and priorities shift often, and a nimble organization must be able to adapt to these changes as they occur. A “one and done” survey becomes a checkbox exercise, rather than a useful tool for managers to drive organizational alignment.

Finally, we also believe data needs to be actionable—and that requires agencies to own the surveys themselves. Asking employees to fill out surveys is a disservice if the results are not collected at the right level of detail, reviewed by the managers closest to the work, and used to diagnose and correct real problems. Organizations, particularly those as large and complex as federal agencies, are too managerially distributed for a centrally administered, government-wide survey to serve every agency’s needs equally well. The game of telephone can wreak havoc with an organization’s ability to succeed: communication is always at risk of degrading the more organizational levels through which it must flow.

Employee engagement surveys should therefore be designed, administered, and acted upon by the agencies that understand their own missions, structures, workforces, and management challenges—not administered by OPM as a government-wide ritual. Done right, surveys become a management tool for agency leaders to measure what matters, identify where alignment is breaking down, and take responsibility for improving the employee experience.

So, today we announced that OPM will no longer centrally administer FEVS. As a centrally-administered system, it’s costly, doesn’t serve as a valuable management tool and fails to enable actionable results. That serves nobody well.

Instead, we have provided detailed guidance to agencies on how best to design surveys that meet their specific needs. That guidance includes a common set of core questions that every agency will ask—ensuring we preserve the ability to track government-wide trends and maintain a coherent thread of data across the federal workforce. The goal isn’t fragmentation; it’s better ownership. Agencies will have the flexibility to go deeper where their missions demand it, while OPM retains the visibility to understand the broader landscape and identify where systemic challenges require government-wide attention.