The annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) has many useful metrics for federal agencies to monitor. And, since it is a government-wide assessment, it enables apples-to-apples comparisons between agencies. Agencies can also compare their scores to previous iterations of the FEVS survey, tracking changes across time. While analyzing your FEVS scores in this manner is a good start, agency leaders should be more strategic with their employee engagement plans. Instead of focusing on whether a metric fluctuates up or down, leaders should be looking to understand the underlying insights. Every federal agency has a specific set of issues that affect their human capital—behind each score there is a story, and leaders should focus on understanding those stories.
The best managers know that happy employees are loyal, productive and engaged. Here are several ways to identify priorities for action and steps to improve employee satisfaction throughout your agency.
4 Steps to Improving Engagement and Satisfaction with FEVS Results
- Review and analyze survey results with your fellow team leaders and managers. Set aside time with your colleagues to better understand the results and determine where improvements are most needed. Third-party tools can help visualize the data and more easily interpret your FEVS results. For instance, workforce analytics tools like the EconSys Survey Reporter can help federal HR managers interact with their results data to drill down, filter and sort reports across all levels of the agency, and enable more informed decisions
- Prioritize opportunities for improvement. Focus on a few key opportunities from your analysis and discussion. Consider utilizing a tool to help you analytically determine the key drivers of change: e.g., discovering which opportunities will drive the most change in employee satisfaction. Through a data visualization tool, federal HR practitioners can pinpoint trends and weaknesses to build appropriate action plans.
- Build your action plans. Determine an action plan for each of the key opportunities to measurably change the outcomes for next year’s survey. Along with policy changes in how you will manage employees, be sure to determine how you will measure progress. Begin by creating SMART goals to ensure that the goals are measurable and achievable. SMART goals, in particular, help to ensure a transparent work environment wherein managers and employees gain an agreed understanding of goals.
- Implement and measure operational changes. As changes are implemented, continue to meet at least monthly with colleagues to understand how effective your action plans have been. There are always adjustments and unforeseen issues that need to be taken into account, so it’s important to be flexible and ready to modify your initial assumptions. Also, report on progress against your SMART goals monthly to ensure transparency and accountability across your team. This will demonstrate to employees that the agency is committed to acting on survey results and providing a more engaging work environment.
FEVS results provide a wealth of information and opportunities that can be leveraged to improve employee engagement across the agency. Utilizing workforce analytics tools to analyze survey results can inform action plans to drive success and create a culture of engagement within your agency.
Data visualization tools can help federal HR managers uncover more value from their Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey results and discover both employee satisfaction drivers and opportunities to improve engagement. The EconSys Survey Reporter enables HR managers to organize survey items to make informed decisions, quickly identify issues and discover trends in employee satisfaction. Most importantly, it allows them to spend more time creating action plans, rather than tediously digging through survey data and reports.
Schedule a call with us today to learn how EconSys and our data analysis solutions help federal agencies gather more insights from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to improve your agency’s employee satisfaction.
