Government-Wide Workplace Category Findings

As part of the Best Places to Work analysis, the Partnership and Boston Consulting Group measure views on seven aspects of the employee experience and provide a government-wide score and individual agency scores for those specific issues. The scores in all these categories improved in 2024.

In the effective leadership category, federal employees continued a long-term trend of highly positive views of supervisors (81.3 out of 100), improving 1.1 points. Employee views of senior leadership improved by 1.6 points to 58.9 but was still low. The large gap between how employees view supervisors and senior leaders has been a consistent and concerning year-by-year trend. Overall, the effective leadership score for 2024, a combination of the employee data on senior leaders and supervisors, was 71.3, a 1.3-point increase compared with 2023.

All the other workplace categories saw improvements of between 1 and 1.6 points in 2024, including employee opinions on recognition (55.5) and pay (59). Employee recognition, however, was the lowest-scoring category, as it was in 2023.

Employees registered a score of 74.4 for their connection to their agency’s mission (mission match), 71.3 for work-life balance and just 57.4 for employee input. The low government-wide scores for recognition and employee input are troublesome since these categories reflect ways in which federal workers and their leaders communicate with one another about challenges, performance and potential agency 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 employees. Having a good system for clear and consistent recognition, and channels for providing employee input, can help create an open and responsive workplace culture and contribute to an engaged and satisfied workforce.

Government-wide Scores by Category