OPM formally discontinues Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey

By Drew Friedman

With two months left for agencies to conduct a required annual assessment of federal employee satisfaction and engagement, the Office of Personnel Management is finalizing major changes to the structure and distribution of the now-defunct Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

Following final regulations published last week, OPM has formally moved forward with ending the distribution of FEVS, which it has overseen for more than 20 years. Instead, it’s telling agencies to issue their own versions of the workforce survey by the end of the calendar year.

OPM said the changes are meant to make the engagement survey more useful and actionable. But critics of OPM’s changes contend that removing the governmentwide survey will undermine years of comparable workforce data and reduce transparency into the results.

In its final rule, OPM pointed to three large agencies that have already discontinued using FEVS — NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Securities and Exchange Commission — as evidence that the engagement survey needed to be individualized.

“Part of the reason the FEVS was discontinued was because its one-size-fits-all approach makes it difficult for agencies to assess their own needs without also doing their own survey in addition to participating in the FEVS,” OPM said.

Still, agencies will have to include core survey questions in their workforce assessments — a list of questions that OPM has also revised substantially. OPM’s final rule made no revisions to the 10 governmentwide questions it initially posed in July.

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Starting this year, agencies will not be required to ask employees about their workload, job satisfaction and whether they would recommend their organization as a good place to work. But agencies will have to add back in two questions asking employees about poor performers in their work units, OPM’s revisions show.

In public comments on OPM’s proposal earlier this year, the Senior Executives Association recommended that OPM publish a “bridge analysis,” detailing the relationship between the outgoing and incoming core questions, “so that agencies do not lose the ability to track trends across the transition, and that OPM retain a floor of governmentwide comparability even as it decentralizes survey administration.”

OPM agreed with the recommendation and said it “will publish a crosswalk discussing the relationship between retiring and incoming items,” when it issues forthcoming implementation guidance.

The final rule follows OPM’s July proposal to revise the required governmentwide survey questions and decentralize FEVS. Last year, OPM fully canceled the 2025 FEVS, marking the first time since the survey launched more than two decades ago that FEVS was not conducted at all.

Several organizations have warned that some of OPM’s changes will lead to an erosion of confidentiality, and by extension, employee trust. Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong initiative said OPM’s overhauls to the core questions will also make it harder to measure engagement and satisfaction.

“The federal government cannot manage what it does not measure, but measurement is useful only when it is valid, trusted and transparent,” said Robert Shriver, managing director of Civil Service Strong. “As the central federal oversight entity for workforce management, OPM should reflect the best in these principles. The proposal would weaken these qualities.”

In response, OPM said it outlined anonymity guidance for agencies in its employee survey playbook, and that it will continue requiring agencies to set confidentiality expectations in their surveys.

“OPM agrees that confidentiality is essential to reliable measurement,” the agency said. “OPM will monitor response rates across agencies and will revisit these safeguards in future administration requirements if participation data indicate an erosion of employee trust.”

The Partnership for Public Service, which recently re-launched its own external engagement survey for federal employees, also warned that OPM’s changes will reduce the ability to measure survey results across agencies, undermining Congress’ intended purpose when it created the federal employee survey requirements in 2004.

“Benchmarks are needed to understand what the survey results are telling us and to hold organizations and leaders accountable,” Partnership for Public Service President and CEO Max Stier said in public comments earlier this year. “If agencies conduct their own surveys without common methodological standards, survey timing, sampling, weighting methods or reporting requirements, comparison will likely not be possible.”

The organization also raised concerns that many agencies will likely struggle with the resources needed to run their own surveys, especially under a shortened timeline. The removal of questions on engagement, satisfaction and workload appears to contradict congressional intent, it added.

“OPM’s decision to cut them consequently appears to be a direct effort to ignore the employee experience and avoid accountability for leadership and management practices over the last year and a half,” Stier said.

OPM largely disagreed with the commenters’ arguments and declined to alter its new framework for the engagement survey. In contrast, OPM said a decentralized survey will improve human capital management “because [agencies] understand their own missions, structures, workforces and management challenges, while a common set of required questions preserves the ability to track governmentwide trends.”

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Though it’s no longer administering FEVS, OPM is now offering new fee-for-service assistance for agencies in need of help distributing their own surveys. OPM’s Human Resources Solutions (HRS) office has rolled out support services — at a cost — to help agencies administer the assessment and prepare post-survey reports.

“Our flexible survey solutions help agencies meet annual employee survey requirements, track workforce trends and priorities, and turn employee feedback into action,” OPM’s website reads. “The organizational assessment survey offers a more tailored way to meet the annual survey requirement.”

The cost of the services depends on factors like agency size and the scope of support needed. An OPM spokesperson declined to share the actual costs associated with the survey services, saying the prices are too varied to provide an accurate estimate.

“OPM is working with interested agencies to clarify their needs, timelines and scope of support,” the spokesperson said.

OPM Director Scott Kupor has said decentralizing the federal employee survey will help agencies achieve a higher level of detail in the results and more helpful workforce insights.

“The key to all this is making sure that these things are done at enough level of frequency and at the appropriate level of granularity, so that at the manager level people can actually get feedback that is actionable for them,” Kupor said in a recent interview with Federal News Network.

“At the end of the day, do we have the elements of a high-performance culture? Do people understand their objectives? Do they understand how their work ties into the overall organization?” Kupor continued. “Those things kind of predict long-term performance of an organization as well as, obviously, long-term retention of key performers.”