In our last blog post, we gave you an introduction to OPM’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS)—and why federal agencies need to care about the results. Consisting of nearly 100 questions, the survey is designed to help agencies measure employee engagement, satisfaction and other fundamental conditions that characterize successful organizations. Through the annual survey, thousands of federal employees give voice to their perceptions of leadership practices, training and development, work-life balance and opportunities for career advancement.
The FEVS is one of the most important tools in government operations. With the help of an enterprise HR platform, the FEVS can be more beneficial to federal agencies than ever before. Here, we’ve listed the top four benefits of the FEVS and how federal HR managers can get the most out of their results.
1. Benchmark Your Agency Against the Rest
Federal employee engagement surveys provide HR practitioners with a vast amount of insight into the experiences and views of federal employees. The FEVS is particularly beneficial as it enables agencies to benchmark their employee perceptions against other government agencies. This comparison helps agencies identify areas where they can improve performance.
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2. Measure Year-Over-Year Successes
While the survey questions may change occasionally, it remains largely the same from year to year, allowing agencies to benchmark their scores across time. And, with an HR platform accompanied by Employee Engagement tools, HR teams can look to indices and historical, year-over-year metrics to develop a broader perspective of their agency’s engagement levels.
3. Collect Accurate and Honest Results
In 2017, over 485,000 federal employees elected to take this voluntary survey to make their voices heard and provide feedback regarding their agency. OPM takes the anonymity of the respondents seriously and releases only aggregated data, ensuring responses cannot be traced back to any one individual. This method empowers respondents to provide honest opinions and grants agencies an accurate assessment of its strengths and weaknesses.
4. Identify Improvement Areas
The FEVS can identify low scores and areas that need improvement. While it can be uncomfortable to receive negative feedback, the first step to solving a problem is discovery. This means analyzing FEVS results to reveal the operational changes your agency needs. Through effective HR software, HR practitioners can efficiently analyze vast amounts of survey data to discover actionable insights and locate areas in need of improvement.
Getting Actionable Insights from FEVS Results
The FEVS has revealed that engaging and including employees leads to more satisfied, productive and motivated personnel, rewarding agencies who actively do both. Coupled with a robust HR platform, the FEVS can generate powerful results and encourage operational improvements. Through software analysis of FEVS results, HR managers can discover insights into improving employee engagement and communication, creating employee development opportunities and determining planning and succession strategies.
For instance, the EconSys FEVS Survey Reporter can help HR managers uncover more value from FEVS data by filtering its voluminous information and identifying key drivers of employee satisfaction. The Survey Reporter can also help agencies target and address problem areas so they can build on positive gains and increase employee satisfaction and engagement.
Schedule a call with us today to learn how EconSys and our HR solutions can help federal agencies gather more insights from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and improve employee engagement.
