Every year, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) conducts the Federal Employ

Every year, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) conducts the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. One of your areas of expertise is appraisal and evaluation, and as such, you have been invited (in your capacity as Director of Personnel Administration for Organization X) to be on a popular podcast to discuss in what ways, if any, this yearly research could be more effective across the board. The inspiration for the podcast and the prompt comes from a drop in response rates for the 2018 survey. In 2018, the percentage of federal workers who responded to the survey came in at almost five percentage points lower than those who responded to the prior year’s survey. The most concerning part of this drop are it happened on the heels of a push from OPM to improve response rates by moving from a survey sample to a census.
The podcast host emailed you as a courtesy, with the following prompt for the show:
“As you know, if an employer waited until evaluation time to start thinking about an employee’s performance, the employee would be in for a weak evaluation. So, based on your expertise in the field of public service, in what ways (if any) could the OPM’s survey be approached in a way that makes it a bit more realistic and reliable?”