OPM Plans Revamped FEVS Focused on ‘Micro-Level’ Workforce Feedback

The 2026 edition of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) is expected to roll out in the coming months, after the administration canceled the government’s flagship HR survey in 2025. 

Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor told Federal News Network that OPM is still designing the revamped survey. FEVS measures employee satisfaction, engagement, and other metrics and is used by agencies to get insight on the workforce and develop improvement plans. 

“The goal is to get to a decision on what the kind of new survey format looks like so that we have time to do something over the course of this fiscal year for sure,” said Director Kupor.

Micro-Level Questions

The survey will reportedly focus on micro-level questions to better gauge employee opinion. Director Kupor said prior versions of FEVS were good at generating “talking points” but did not effectively measure elements like performance culture and merit-based hiring. 

“What you really care about, at least what I care about, is at the individual manager level, do we know that … people understand their objectives? Are they held accountable to those objectives?” Director Kupor said on The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton. “It’s really at the micro level that we care about these things.”

Director Kupor also praised agencies for conducting short pulse surveys to identify workforce challenges in the absence of a more formal survey.

OPM canceled the 2025 survey to align the content with administration objectives. 

However, the Partnership for Public Service conducted its own survey. While not directly comparable, it contained similar questions with the Partnership finding that morale in the federal workforce “is as low as imaginable.”

OPM said the survey should be viewed with “as large of a grain of salt that your stomach can tolerate.”

Focus on Culture

The survey redesign aligns with broader administration efforts to reshape federal performance management and workplace culture.

Director Kupor said the administration is fostering a “high performance culture” focused on rewarding top performers, noting that “as we think about bonuses and reward systems and recognition, that we disproportionately bring those to the people who truly are going above and beyond in delivering it for the American people.”