Results from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey offer key insights for agencies to learn about their workforces, and the survey is the basis of the influential “Best Places to Work” rankings issued by the Partnership for Public Service, but those rankings should not be taken as the last word, the Merit Systems Protection Board has cautioned.
Survey results can offer valuable insights into employee concerns and perspectives on organizational strengths and weaknesses but they are far from a definitive measure of leadership quality or a sound basis for making career choices, MSPB said.
It warned against relying solely on an annual indicator of job satisfaction to identify a “best place to work” and even compared the idea behind such a ranking to “a best car to drive” to underscore the inherent arbitrariness of such a measure.
Although the rankings to offer some utility, job satisfaction itself, which is behind the best place to work rankings, doesn’t correlate to employee performance as much as when employees report being highly engaged in their work.