UC Irvine

We describe important and common management and labor needs across more than 80 federal agencies as identified by the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and offer evidence-based interventions for addressing them based on organizational science research. Our recommendations have the synergistic goals of improving employee wellbeing, employee productivity, and agency performance and innovation, which will result in increased agency efficiency and effectiveness for the taxpayer. Specifically, we describe empirical findings and offer suggestions for interventions to improve (a) employee motivation through engagement, empowerment, and embeddedness; (b) employee voice; and (c) within- and across-unit cooperation, communication, and collaboration. We offer recommendations that are sufficiently general to be relevant to many agencies, while also being concrete and actionable. We also offer suggestions for associated research that could be conducted in federal agencies interested in these topics.