For more than two decades, the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) has worked the same way. Once a year, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) distributed a governmentwide survey, agencies waited for the results, and leaders got a snapshot that was often months old by the time anyone could act on it. Recently OPM proposed to change that model entirely.
Under the proposed new rule, individual agencies will design, run, and manage their own employee surveys instead of relying on a single centrally administered survey. A common set of core questions will still be required so OPM and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) can track trends across government, but agencies will gain the flexibility to go deeper on the issues with questions specific to their own workforce. OPM Director Scott Kupor framed the change as a move toward "better ownership," arguing that the traditional centralized approach was costly and didn't translate into individualized results agencies could act on.
Decentralizing FEVS is poised to genuinely help agencies if they use the flexibility to move faster, ask better questions, and drive outcomes for the employees and customers they serve. The previous model gave agencies a report card once a year that they didn't design and usually couldn't act on quickly. The new model would let agencies tailor questions to their own workforce and get results to managers to act on in time to matter.
Federal employees deliver the services communities depend on, including processing benefits, staffing hospitals, running programs people count on. When employees feel heard, supported, and see their feedback lead to real change, that shows up downstream too: shorter wait times, fewer errors, a better experience for every citizen who interacts with government.
If implemented correctly, this shift has the potential to create the conditions for a stronger federal workforce that delivers better outcomes for the American people.
A model built for outcomes and accountability
This new approach to the Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Act’s requirement for an annual employee survey has the capacity to better deliver the results the statute intended: driving a more strategic, outcomes-based approach to managing talent in the Federal government, and holding agency leaders and managers accountable for their critical role.
If the proposed rule is approved and agencies assume management of their own annual surveys, there are program elements they can implement to drive results.
- Time the survey based on mission cadence: Agencies will have the ability to control when employees receive the survey, and work around periods of peak workload. For example, sending the survey after the close of the fiscal year, rather than before, can show employees the agency understands the pressures they’re under at certain times of year.
- Ask less, listen more: Agencies will be able to streamline their annual survey instruments to reduce the time investment required of employees to provide feedback. This could help to drive up response rates so agencies can get better insights on the workforce as a whole. Advancements in technology can also help agencies probe open-ended responses in real time to make sure they get the full picture of employees’ experiences.
- Focus on the outcome, not just the analysis: With automated analytic tools surfacing key insights, agencies will be able to focus on helping managers take meaning and visible action to address what their teams are telling them. AI-enabled tools like team-level results summaries, and action recommendations based on best practices in government organizations, can make driving outcomes easier and faster for busy managers. Collaborative action planning is also a great way to engage employees in designing the experiences they need to be productive.
- Accelerate outcomes: Perhaps the most important result will be the ability of individual agencies to significantly speed the cycle between listening, analyzing and taking action. If implemented, insights can be surfaced in days instead of months, and managers can immediately start action planning based on their team-level results. This has the potential to further increase employees’ confidence that when they provide feedback, leaders not only listen - they do something to address what employees are experiencing.
More effectively turning feedback into outcomes can produce important benefits for organizations, employees and customers. A caseworker who can flag a broken process quickly, and see leadership fix the issue, closes the gap between someone filing a claim and actually getting the support they need. Workforce retention improves, since employees are less likely to leave when they trust that raising a concern leads to action. And problems caught and fixed early reduce persistent performance issues that are more expensive to address later.
4 priorities for agencies to get ahead of the proposed changes
To get ahead of the proposed changes should the new rule be approved, agencies should prioritize the following aspects:
- Protect comparability: If implemented, agencies will have more room to add their own questions, but that room can turn into dozens of homegrown questions no one can benchmark. Agencies should pick supplemental questions that map to real risks, like retention and talent competition, not just what's easy to ask.
- Build the reporting pipeline early: The proposed rule requires results to reach OPM and OMB within 90 days of completion. Before the new survey potentially launches, agencies should start to build the reporting pipeline now, so they don’t have to scramble once the data comes in. Static reports built by hand won’t hold up on that timeline. Platforms with real-time dashboards based on interoperable data feeds will.
- Make manager action the metric that matters, not survey completion: The administration's own framing around the new role centers on accountability for performance. Agencies that will be able to show a manager acted on results quickly will look very different from agencies that can only show a survey went out.
- Pick a platform built on real authorization, not a compliance claim: Employee data is sensitive, and securing it used to be OPM's job. Now every agency owns that risk directly. Agencies should look for a platform with real government-grade authorization behind it, like FedRAMP High.
What this shift makes possible
If the proposed rule is approved, there will be a longer-term opportunity. An annual engagement survey tells agencies a lot on its own, but it tells them more when it's connected to the other moments where employees give feedback, like onboarding, training, exit interviews. An agency that can see how onboarding experience relates to intent to stay, or how training feedback shows up later in performance, has a fuller picture to work from when it's planning its workforce needs, not just a single data point once a year.
This suggested shift is what ownership makes possible. Instead of one centralized snapshot a year, agencies can potentially build a system that sees problems coming instead of just reacting to them.
