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By: FEDweek StaffThe annual report on the best places to work in government again says that overall, the federal government lags the private sector in employee engagement, adding that “effective leadership remains the key driver of employee engagement as it has been every year since the rankings were launched in 2003.”
The report set an overall federal workforce engagement score of 69, compared with a benchmark score in the private sector by the employee research firm Mercer of 77. The federal score is largely based on employee responses to questions on the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey regarding satisfaction with their jobs and organizations; the Partnership said that due to some differences in how that is calculated, the 2020 score cannot be directly compared with prior years.
Only 22 of the government’s 71 large, mid-size and small agencies scored above the private sector average, which “makes clear that the federal government still has a lot of work to do to improve its competitiveness with the private sector as an employer of choice,” said the Partnership, which performs the study along with the Boston Consulting Group.
It said that a government-wide score on effectiveness of leadership “stood at just 64.2 out of 100. Supervisors drew a rating of 78.0 out of 100, but senior leaders came in considerably lower at 57.8 out of 100. In addition, employees gave their leaders only a score of 57.9 on empowerment, which measures satisfaction with their involvement in work pro¬cesses and decisions that affect their work.”
That reflects results in the FEVS survey that annually show that employee views of leadership decline at each successively higher level of leaders.
“While employees felt their leaders supported them during the pandemic, additional data based on a set of non-COVID related questions shows that long-standing issues with federal leadership persist in the eyes of the federal workforce,” it said.
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