The Partnership for Public Service created the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings to provide a comprehensive rating of employee engagement across federal agencies and their subcomponents. We use the term employee engagement to refer to the satisfaction and commitment of the workforce and the willingness of employees to put forth discretionary effort to achieve results.
The 2018 Best Places to Work rankings include 488 federal organizations: 17 large federal agencies, 27 midsize agencies, 29 small agencies
The majority of the data used to develop these rankings were collected by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) through its Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. The survey was administered April through June 2018 to permanent executive branch employees and was completed by 598,003 federal workers, for a response rate of 40.6 percent, a decline of 4.9 points from 2017. Visit OPM’s website to learn more about the FEVS methodology.
The rankings also include responses from more than 249,000 additional employees at 12 agencies who were surveyed at the same time and had a response rate of more than 50 percent. The Architect of the Capitol, Congressional Budget Office, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Veterans Affairs, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Government Accountability Office, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Office of the Inspector General at the Tennessee Valley Authority, Office of the Inspector General at the United States Postal Service, Peace Corps, Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Army Audit Agency provided data from their own surveys. In addition, the rankings incorporate responses from employees at the nation’s intelligence agencies, which conducted a similar survey but did not report the number of respondents because it is classified.
For the first time since the launch of the Best Places to Work rankings in 2003, the Department of Veterans Affairs did not participate in the 2018 FEVS and instead decided to administer its own internal survey. Since the VA’s survey included the three questions needed to calculate an agency’s Best Places to Work employee engagement score, the department is included in our rankings. However, like other agencies that conduct their own surveys, we have not included the VA’s data in the calculation of the 2018 government-wide score.
The Best Places to Work statistical model, developed with CFI Group in 2003, is based on the same methodology used in CFI Group’s American Customer Satisfaction Index. The Best Places to Work index is calculated based on the percentage of positive responses to three workplace satisfaction questions and is weighted according to a proprietary formula developed with Hay Group in 2007.
The workplace category scores are calculated by averaging the percentage of positive responses to questions in 10 categories, including effective leadership, employee
The Partnership and BCG would like to thank OPM for