FEVS Was Useful. Will An Alternative Survey Fill Data Gaps?
The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) has been canceled for 2025 and leaves a data gap for agencies that rely on it to understand workforce sentiment and engagement. To fill that gap, an alternative survey is currently being fielded — not by the government but by the Partnership for Public Service, a bipartisan nonprofit organization — that is formatted to mirror FEVS. The survey is overseen by an advisory board with a mix of public administration academics and private-sector experts, and we expect that results will be made publicly available, just like data from FEVS. This approach offers promise, and we will be among those taking a look at the data to guide our agency clients in 2026. How much agency leadership will be able to use the data for effective employee experience (EX) assessment and management will depend on a few key facts about the new survey and how it is used:
The survey link is public. Though the survey will be administered with the assistance of several unions of federal employees to ensure that the right participants respond, the public link can and will be manipulated by bots and other bad actors. This is not a fatal flaw — there is a screening page to mitigate this, and there are several back-end analysis techniques that can help verify that responses are valid. We’ll be watching closely to see how much of this process is disclosed when the data is finally collected and cleaned.
The results will contain flaws, but used properly, these results can still inform your employee engagement strategy. We regularly use FEVS data to guide our agency clients on how to understand the state of trust, teamwork, and culture. This is all still possible with the new data, just with the right caveats applied after the validation analysis is complete. Features such as year-over-year comparisons may not be possible, or at least not for all agencies, but in-survey comparisons between different departments should still be useful. All of this can help you identify aspects of EX that you can and should be working to shape. We can help you make sense of the data and make a measured response.
One errant messenger can jam the works even after the survey is complete. In the hands of someone with an axe to grind, these results will offer plenty of opportunities to critique the current administration. We’ll be watching to see if any interest groups frame the data in this way, reporting results even if they are hard to validate or overstating the conclusions supported by the data. In our opinion, this will undermine confidence in the data because it will be easy for administration defenders to point out the potential challenges in the data to discredit the interest groups. More importantly for our agency clients, this might also lead some agencies to forbid the use of the data in order to avoid executive branch scrutiny.
We’re in a “wait and see” period for this data. But when you’re ready to use this or other data you’ve collected to guide discussion and address workforce needs, we’ll be here. Until then, we’d love to hear how you’re keeping a pulse on the federal employee experience.
