The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) released new guidance on July 9 that provides federal agencies with a roadmap for administering their own federal employee surveys, beginning with the 2026 survey cycle.
The move comes after OPM announced earlier this month that it would end its annual administration of the Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and pass that task to individual agencies.
“OPM remains committed to supporting agencies in advancing employee engagement and organizational effectiveness,” OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote in a July 9 memorandum. “To help agencies meet these requirements, OPM has developed an Employee Survey Playbook, a step-by-step resource designed to make survey planning and execution as straightforward as possible, from initial planning through data submission.”
According to the memo, agencies must submit survey results to OPM and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) within 90 days after completing their surveys. While OPM will no longer centrally administer FEVS, agencies must continue to meet statutory annual employee survey requirements.
Kupor said agencies also may request survey support from OPM’s Human Resources Solutions organization.
Agencies are also required to post the annual employee survey results publicly on their websites “unless doing so would jeopardize or impact national security.”
While agencies now have broad flexibility to design and administer their own surveys, the playbook requires every agency to include 10 government-wide questions.
The required questions cover:
- Managers communicating organizational goals
- Cooperation among coworkers
- Recognition of performance
- Supervisor feedback and career development
- Supervisor accountability for results
- Employees’ understanding of how their work supports agency goals
- Employee empowerment
- Protection from reprisal for reporting suspected wrongdoing
- Whether managers address poor performance
- What ultimately happens to poor performers
Agencies may supplement those questions with additional items, but OPM said they are not required to do so. Any additional questions will go through a review and approval process.
When developing additional questions, OPM encouraged agencies to consider leadership priorities and strategic initiatives, workplace culture and inclusion, change management, and employee engagement and well-being.
Notably absent from the playbook is a requirement or recommendation to measure federal employees’ overall job satisfaction – something that FEVS measured in the past.
“Agencies will have the flexibility to go deeper where their missions demand it, while OPM retains the visibility to understand the broader landscape and identify where systemic challenges require government-wide attention,” Kupor wrote in a blog post earlier this month outlining the changes.
Kupor also said “surveying once per year is sub-optimal,” adding that a “‘one and done’ survey becomes a checkbox exercise.”
The changes come after OPM did not administer the FEVS in 2025. OPM announced last August that the Trump administration was canceling the annual FEVS for the first time since 2002.
Last month, lawmakers pressed OPM to provide the proposed 2026 FEVS questions. They said that regulations mandate that agencies conduct the annual workforce survey with 16 core questions before the end of each calendar year, not 10.
“Given the critical importance of the FEVS and your announced changes to the survey, we request detailed explanations … to ensure that the FEVS 2026 survey provides valuable insights and complies with the law,” the lawmakers wrote.