Commentary: The Balancing Act: Addressing the Needs of Federal Managers and Researchers through the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey

• Author: Kimya S. Lee
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12386
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• Date: 01 May 2015

Commentary

Kimya S. Lee serves as the U.S. Off‌i ce of

Personnel Management’s technical expert

on research and evaluation to support

data-driven human resource management

and policy decision making. One of her chief

responsibilities is establishing the strategic

direction for the department’s research and

evaluation initiatives, as informed by the

analytic needs of the program off‌i ces.

E-mail: kimya.lee@opm.gov

The Balancing Act: Addressing the Needs of Federal Managers and Researchers through the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey 395

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 3, pp. 395–396. Published 2015.

This article is a U.S. Government work and

is in the public domain in the USA.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12386.

On behalf of the entire Federal Employee

Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) program at the

U.S. Office of Personnel Management

(OPM), we commend Sergio Fernandez and his

colleagues for their perspicacious critical review.

Reflecting on this article has broadened our own

perspective, and we anticipate that it will incite even

more academic interest in the survey, which is very

beneficial for the program, federal agencies, as well as

our internal and external stakeholders.

OPM understands how important and valuable data

and research are to helping us make policy for our

current workforce and plan for the federal workforce

of the future. Using data and research to drive our

policy decisions at OPM is so important to Director

Katherine Archuleta and the current administration

that it is one of the nine goals in OPM’s 2014–18

Strategic Plan.

The FEVS is increasingly used as a management tool

to assist agencies in understanding the needs of their

employee populations at all levels of the organization

and in taking specific action to improve employee

engagement and performance. If the overall purpose

of conducting the survey were strictly to collect demo-

graphic, economic, or workforce statistics, or even if it

were primarily a research, academic, or methodologi-

cal exercise, taking a more purely technical perspective

would be in order. However, we are consistently bal-

ancing the demands for a technically rigorous survey

program with the needs of a practical, user-friendly

data implementation strategy for more than 80 federal

agencies.

Although resource limitations, logistical constraints,

and public law render us unable to act on each and

every suggestion, we continually strive to improve

the overall quality and utility of the data produced.

For example, we redesigned our sampling strategy in

2013 to provide an even deeper level of stratification,

improving representativeness and enabling human

resource managers to receive employee feedback

in work units as deep as nine levels down into the

organization. In addition to disseminating thousands

of static reports, we recently unveiled two Web-based

tools for managers and executives to conduct custom-

ized analyses.

We found it both impressive and gratifying that the

authors were able to identify more than 40 peer-

reviewed journal articles in the public administration

literature featuring FEVS data. This has spurred an

ongoing internal effort to augment the list with works

from additional literatures, such as those encom-

passing industrial and organizational psychology

and survey methodology. We plan to post the more

comprehensive bibliography on our website, similar

in spirit to what other government-sponsored surveys

have done (see, e.g., the Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention’s bibliography at http://www.cdc.gov/

nchs/nsfg/nsfg_bibliography.htm), and continually

update it based on our own discoveries and an auto-

mated mechanism by which website visitors can notify

the FEVS team of additional qualifying works.

As noted by the authors, one of the strengths of a

repeated cross-sectional survey such as the FEVS

is the ability to track changes over time. Currently,

this is done in the aggregate, for the government as

a whole or for a particular agency or agency compo-

nent. In fact, researchers should be advised that we

recently released a consolidated survey response file to

facilitate this (see http://www.fedview.opm.gov/2014/

EVSDATA/ for more details). The authors urge

OPM to construct a panel data set, one differentiat-

ing specific individuals’ survey responses at multiple

points in time, which would enable researchers to

employ more sophisticated longitudinal and causal

analysis model techniques. That is a good suggestion

that may be possible with some careful thought and

planning. One approach would be to retroactively

assimilate individual responses from prior survey

administrations, but that introduces the complexity

of how to jointly compensate for individuals’ variable

sampling rates within and across administrations,

 e Balancing Act: Addressing the Needs of Federal

Managers and Researchers through the Federal Employee

Viewpoint Survey

Kimya S. Lee

U.S. Off‌i ce of Personnel Management