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Answering your questions about our new Public Service Viewpoint Survey

Earlier this month, the Partnership for Public Service released the 2025 Public Service Viewpoint Survey, designed to fill the gap left by the Office of Personnel Management’s cancellation of the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. Our survey provides career federal employees with an opportunity to share their perspectives on their workplace, work unit, supervisor, organization and leadership.

Thank you to everyone who has engaged with our survey so far! There have been important questions and concerns raised, so we wanted to cover some of them here.

Who can take the survey? 

All permanent, civilian, career federal employees from executive, legislative and judicial branch agencies are eligible to participate in the survey. This includes civilian employees who work for intelligence and defense-associated agencies, as well as uniformed members of commissioned corps. Federal contractors and those who have left federal service are not eligible.

Why can’t former federal employees who recently left government take the survey? 

We want the 2025 Public Service Viewpoint Survey to be as comparable as possible with past federal employee surveys like the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. To do so, we are mirroring the participation rules used by OPM and other agencies as closely as possible. While we understand that this may frustrate those who recently left the federal workforce, federal agencies only include current federal employees in their surveys. 

While not a perfect substitution for an employee experience or exit survey, several storytelling projects collect information on the experiences of employees who recently departed federal service. The Partnership is supporting one such initiative, the POPVOX Foundation’s Departure Dialogues Project.

How are you keeping federal employees who participate safe? 

We strongly encourage respondents to complete the survey outside of official work hours and on nonwork devices. Additionally, we discourage respondents from sharing information about the survey through official agency channels such as work email addresses. 

All response data will be kept secure and encrypted. Any personally identifiable information or demographic data shared with us will be restricted to the Partnership’s data team and only be used for survey administration and analysis. While we ask for a personal email as a part of the verification process, it will not be used to contact respondents for any reason and will be deleted upon completing the data cleaning process. 

In addition to protecting data about you, all survey findings shared by the Partnership will be anonymized in a way that will prevent you or your responses from being identified. We are only asking the most essential demographic and screening questions required to confirm eligibility and weight responses. Following the Office of Personnel Management’s approach, data for demographic groups with less than 30 respondents will not be shared outside the Partnership. Agencies will not have access to privileged reports with any more details than those shared with the public.

Why are you collecting emails from respondents? 

We are not asking respondents for their work emails, and we strongly discourage sharing them with us. We do ask for a personal email as a part of the survey, but it will not be used for contacting or marketing to participants, and it will not be shared with any partner organizations. We are also restricting access to all personally identifiable information related to the survey, like emails to the Partnership’s data team. 

These email addresses are being collected to identify duplicate survey submissions and verify that responses are legitimate. After the survey closes, we will use a subset of the respondents’ emails and publicly available information to verify that individuals in our subset are people who meet our qualifications. This information will increase our confidence in the validity of the sample. Once that process is completed, all email addresses will be deleted. 

I started the survey but did not finish taking it in one sitting. Can I still take it? 

If you do not complete the survey in one sitting, you should be able to open the link again, although you may have to use a different browser or device if you encounter any issues. If you experienced a technical issue that forced you to leave the survey after completing the verification page (i.e., Page 2 of the survey), then please use the same personal email address. 

If you encounter any problems while taking the survey, please reach out to us at PSVS@ourpublicservice.org.

Why was the survey conducted during the 2025 government shutdown? Does the survey ask about employees’ experiences during the shutdown? 

The survey seeks to capture federal employees’ experiences across the entire year, not just during the shutdown. The survey administration period was delayed due to the shutdown, but the start date of Nov. 10, 2025, was determined by factors independent of the government’s status. 

Work on creating the Public Service Viewpoint Survey began in mid-August, after the cancellation of the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey was announced. We originally intended to release the survey two months later, in mid-October. However, when the federal government shut down on Oct. 1, 2025, we decided to delay the start of the survey to Nov. 10. This was the latest we could hold the survey without having its window extend into the holiday season in December. 

We have included a question about the respondent’s work status during the shutdown to capture any observable differences between employees who were required to work without pay (i.e., employees with an excepted status), those who were furloughed, and those whose work and pay continued despite the shutdown (i.e., employees with an exempt status).

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