Government-Wide Workplace Category Findings

As part of the Best Places to Work analysis, the Partnership and Boston Consulting Group measure views on eight aspects of the employee experience and provide a government-wide score and individual agency scores for those specific issues.  

All categories that can be compared with results from 2022 increased in score in 2023. However, some of our categories are not comparable between 2022 and 2023, due to changes in their question structure. Among these are the overall effective leadership category (70 out of 100), work-life balance (70.1) and recognition (53.9), which is the lowest scoring category for the 2023 rankings. 

In the effective leadership category, we can compare the scores for the supervisor and senior leader subcategories from 2022 to 2023. Federal employees continue to express highly positive views of supervisors (80.2), making it the highest-rated workplace category. For the first time since 2020, employee views of senior leadership have improved by 2 points to 57.3. Despite this notable improvement, there is still a large gap between how employees view supervisors and senior leaders. This differential, and the fact that scores for effective leadership at the small and midsize agencies are higher than those at the large agencies, may also signal the importance of leadership communication and interpersonal trust. 

Examining the remaining comparable categories, mission match (73.3); diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (71.6); and pay (57.4) have all increased between 1.5 to 1.6 points in 2023. Among DEIA’s subcategories, inclusion is the highest rated at 76.4 followed by diversity at 71.3. Accessibility has the largest increase of any category, improving 2.2 points to 69.1. The lowest rated DEIA subcategory is equity at 66.6. 

Finally, we have introduced two new categories in 2023 to assess important aspects of the employee experience: professional development and employee input. Professional development (66.8) measures the extent to which employees feel their organization takes full advantage of the talents they bring to their job and how well the organization invests in opportunities to improve their skills. Employee input measures the extent to which employees feel they can voice their opinions and influence decisions related to their work. Employees rate this category at 56.3, the second lowest behind recognition. 

The low government-wide scores for recognition and employee input are concerning, since these categories measure employee opinions on several ways they and their leaders can communicate with one another about challenges, performance and potential innovation. Recognition is also a critical tool for reinforcing messaging on the agency’s strategic goals by providing illustrative examples of quality work being done by the employees. Having a good system for clear and equitable recognition, and a fair means of providing employee input, are important for creating an open, responsive leadership culture and for building an engaged and satisfied workforce. 

Government-wide Scores by Category

*Because the Department of Veterans Affairs and several other agencies did not participate in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and instead decided to administer their own internal surveys, they are not included in federal government-wide workplace category scores but are part of the agency rankings.