Even small shifts in the federal workforce can mean a whole lot — that’s the message the Office of Personnel Management wants to leave with agency leaders about the results of the 2024 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

The FEVS employee engagement index, for instance, rose by just 1% between 2023 and 2024. But OPM said that incremental increase represents more than what meets the eye: the 73% governmentwide score this year marks the highest ever employee engagement score since OPM first added the index to FEVS in 2010.

“While one percentage point may seem modest, it is a significant achievement, as it takes many thousands of employees governmentwide changing their perspective to achieve that increase,” OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver said in a FEVS management report, which OPM published last week.

The new management report, along with spreadsheets of agency-specific survey data, give agencies the opportunity to review, compare and analyze their 2024 FEVS results. Last week, OPM also updated its new FEVS dashboard with deeper data for workforce leaders, agencies, and the public to view and analyze.

In that data, more trends are beginning to emerge from the federal workforce’s feedback — even if subtle.

Some agencies, for instance, had much higher engagement scores than the 73% governmentwide number. The Energy Department saw its engagement score rise to 80% this year. Again, Energy’s engagement score represents just a 1% increase since 2023, but it also maintains the increasing trend the agency has seen for the last few years. In 2020, by comparison, Energy’s employee engagement index score was 77%.

Energy also had the highest response rate of any large agency on the 2024 FEVS, with 78% of employees taking the survey earlier this year.

“Not only did almost 1,500 more Energy employees take the FEVS in 2024 than the prior year, but we saw a significant positive change in overall employee engagement,” Erin Moore, Energy’s chief human capital officer, said during a CHCO Council meeting last week.

And for Moore, agency leaders are a “huge” influence on employee engagement.

“Leadership truly is a skill in its own right — it requires constant learning and self-evaluation, and it has to evolve to meet an everchanging work environment,” Moore said. “Whether you’re a new manager or someone who’s been in a leadership role for years, our perspective is that we need to equip our leaders with tools that will help them continue to grow and develop their leadership skills.”

To try to help enhance leadership at Energy, and by extension employee engagement, Moore said the agency identified three critical skills — fostering trust and respect, addressing issues, and communicating effectively — and worked to improve in those areas over the last year.

In particular, Energy used those three themes in its “let’s lead” initiative for senior executives, managers and supervisors. The agency then created a targeted development curriculum for leaders, which included a series that focused specifically on training leaders in how to improve employee engagement.

“We had interactive panel discussions, group activities, coursework and training for our leaders,” Moore said. “We’re also now developing a leadership development continuum … to help embed those leadership skills into do ease leadership pipeline so that we’re supporting effective succession planning.”

After the 2023 FEVS results were released last year, Energy also launched a two-week “call to action,” asking managers and supervisors to share their survey results, identify areas of strength and weakness, and then work to develop strategies for improvement in the more challenging areas.

“My office provided direct support to some organizations during this call to action in terms of communications, training and facilitation services,” Moore said.

But Energy wasn’t the only agency that saw promising scores in the 2024 FEVS. The General Services Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency were two other large agencies that earned strong employee engagement results this year, at 86% and 81% scores, respectively. The departments of Labor, Commerce, and Health and Human Services all had employee engagement scores in the high 70s as well.

Higher engagement scores also appear to correlate with higher FEVS scores on the global satisfaction index, which measures how employees feel about their pay and in their jobs. Many agencies with high engagement scores also saw high satisfaction scores among their employees.

Generally, agencies can use FEVS to understand how their employees are thinking about approaches to management, workplace policies and new agency initiatives. Values like contributing to the common good and meeting the needs of customers were some of the highest scoring areas from employees who took the survey this year.

But at the same time, this year’s FEVS results show “topics that need governmentwide focus for improvements, such as resilience, employee recognition and innovation, which are key dimensions of organizational health and performance,” OPM said in its management report.

Moving forward, OPM said it will work with agencies to help them target and take action to improve areas of their workplaces, as well as consider initiatives that might support FEVS results. OPM also plans to expand its FEVS data dashboard in future years.

Also to help agencies with FEVS, the CHCO Council maintains an employee engagement working group, which focuses on creating strategies to boost federal workforce scores year to year.

Jason Miller, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, said the high score for employee engagement on the 2024 FEVS is the result of several years of work.

“We were really focused on that back at the beginning of the administration for a number of different reasons. But one is that, ultimately, employee engagement links to performance. A highly engaged workforce means we’re delivering for the people that we’re serving,” Miller said during a Dec. 4 White House event on the President’s Management Agenda. “Everything we do is a result of the people and the teams that are doing the work. And if we focus on the people and the teams, we will get better results and better outcomes.”

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