Fedweek

Partial results from the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey conducted earlier this year show slight gains for the second straight year in two indicators that the administration views as key, overall employee satisfaction with working for the government and their engagement with their work. Both measures—which effectively serve as stand-ins for employee morale—rose by one percentage point, to 65 percent positive for engagement and 61 percent positive for satisfaction. Of 587 major agency components in the survey, employee engagement scores increased in 401 and in 123 it rose by six percentage points or more. Officials attributed the two-year gains—which came after four years of decline—as reflecting agency efforts to be more responsive to employee concerns about workplace practices, as well as reinstatement of annual pay raises after the three-year freeze ending in 2014. The measures are based on responses to certain individual questions in the survey. A separate measure of how inclusive employees feel their workplaces are also rose by a point, to 58 percent positive. Some 400,000 employees responded to the survey, a 46 percent response rate.