When seeing the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government results this year, many agencies may be breathing a sigh of relief. It’s not necessarily because of where they landed in the rankings. Rather, it’s because there appears to be a broader atmospheric shift for the federal workforce.

The Partnership for Public Service and Boston Consulting Group released the 2023 Best Places to Work results Monday. In analysis that comes alongside the rankings, the Partnership’s governmentwide measure of engagement and satisfaction rose for the first time in four years. The index score is now 65.7 out of 100, a 2.3-point increase since last year’s rankings. Before this year’s results, there had been several consecutive years of declining scores in the Best Places to Work series. The Partnership even called the 2022 rankings a “warning signal” for agency leaders. But Partnership President and CEO Max Stier said the latest analysis holds much more promise.

“Any organization should understand that employee morale is the most important ingredient for improved performance,” Stier said Monday on The Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “This is not about happy employees. This is about better-performing organizations and better mission achievement.”

Like Stier said, engagement and satisfaction aren’t really a measure of how “happy” federal employees feel. Instead, it depicts how federal employees view both their agencies and their jobs. It looks at how employees perceive their work environment and their leaders. The Partnership bases the index on questions such as “how likely am I to recommend my agency as a good place to work?” and “how much satisfaction do I get out of my job?” 

For the 2023 Best Places to Work, more than two-thirds of agencies either maintained or increased their engagement and satisfaction scores. By comparison, in the 2022 Best Places to Work results, only a quarter of agencies had those same results.

It’s hard to point to a single reason causing the tone shift this year, and it may vary depending on the agency.

But one throughline was the impact of returning to the office. In the 2023 Best Places to Work, employees who teleworked full-time had the highest engagement and satisfaction scores, at an average of 74.6 out of 100. By comparison, employees who work in headquarters offices and at field offices scored 69.2 and 61.7 on the same scale, respectively. 

The Partnership largely derives its analysis from Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) data. Notably, the 2023 FEVS collected responses from feds prior to many agencies’ return-to-office changes over the last several months.

From the 2023 results, it’s also clear that federal employees want their voices to be heard even more. Some of the lowest-scoring areas in the Partnership’s measurements of work-related issues were employee input and employee recognition. Those areas received scores of 56.3 and 53.9 out of 100.

Although the score is relatively low, there have been some improvements in employee confidence, the Partnership said. For the 2023 FEVS, employees gave their agencies a score of 47.7 out of 100 on the question of whether they believed the results of the survey would be used to make their agency a better place to work. It’s almost always the lowest-scoring FEVS question. But employees’ score this year represents a nearly 5-point increase since the 2022 results.

The Partnership also measures leadership, recognition, work-life balance, pay, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Employees reported the highest scores on how connected they feel to agency's mission. That measurement received a score of 73.3 out of 100.