About Best Places
Designed to help a broad audience of government leaders, employees, job seekers, and researchers, the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings draw on responses from more than 266,000 civil servants to produce a detailed view of employee satisfaction and commitment across 308 federal agencies and subcomponents.
Employee satisfaction and commitment are two necessary ingredients in developing high-performing organizations and attracting top talent. The Best Places to Work rankings are an important tool for ensuring that employee satisfaction is a top priority for government managers and leaders. The rankings provide a mechanism to hold agency leaders accountable for the health of their organizations, serve as an early warning sign for agencies in trouble, offer a roadmap for improvement and give job seekers insights into how federal employees view their agencies.
The Partnership for Public Service uses data from the Office of Personnel Management's Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to rank agencies and their subcomponents according to a Best Places to Work index score. Agencies and subcomponents are not only measured on overall employee satisfaction, but are scored in 10 workplace categories, such as effective leadership, employee skills/mission match, pay and work/life balance.
The Best Places to Work rankings provide a snapshot overview of each agency and subcomponent, trend data and expert analysis of what the results mean. Users can conduct side-by-side comparisons of how agencies or their subcomponents ranked in various categories, how they compare to other agencies, and whether they have improved or regressed over time.
Since the first rankings were released in 2003, they have helped create much-needed institutional incentives to focus on key workforce issues and have provided managers and leaders with a way to measure and improve employee satisfaction and commitment. Federal human capital professionals have reported that the Best Places to Work rankings have heightened awareness among senior leaders and spurred reform of workplace practices.
The rankings also address one of the biggest barriers to federal employment: a lack of cross-governmental information for prospective employees. The Best Places to Work rankings provide job seekers unprecedented insight on opportunities for public service by highlighting the federal government's high-performing agencies and by promoting federal organizations that often go unheralded.
About the Partnership
The Partnership for Public Service is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to revitalize the federal government by inspiring a new generation to serve and by transforming the way government works.
The Partnership:
- Raises awareness and helps improve public attitudes about government service.
- Promotes government service through outreach to college campuses and jobseekers.
- Provides hands-on assistance to federal agencies to improve their operations.
- Advocates for needed legislative and regulatory reforms to strengthen the civil service.
- Generates thought-provoking research on, and effective responses to, the workforce challenges facing the federal government.
The Partnership for Public Service wishes to acknowledge the contribution of Robert M. Tobias, Director of Key Executive Leadership Programs at American University, for his contributions in the initiation and continued development of the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings.
The Best Places to Work rankings — the most comprehensive and authoritative rating of employee satisfaction and commitment in the federal government — are produced by the Partnership for Public Service.
