One of the most useful aspects of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey is the ability to look at trends over time.

This year, the conventional wisdom was that we would see a significant drop in federal employee satisfaction and engagement due to the current pay freeze, the threat of a government shutdown due to a lapse in appropriation that was pending at the time the survey was conducted, and the increase in negative public attitudes toward government and – by extension – toward government employees, and declining agency budgets.

Since 2003, federal employee satisfaction and engagement has been trending up and it looked like that was about to change.

A major surprise in the results released Sept. 15 by the Office of Personnel Management, therefore, is that overall federal employee job satisfaction did not take a major hit.

In fact, 68.9 percent of the 266,000 federal employees who responded to the 2011 survey say they would recommend their organization as a good place to work, which is down only slightly from the 69.7 percent who gave the response in 2010 and significantly up from the 63.5 percent who gave that response in 2006!

High employee satisfaction and engagement is important because it is highly correlated with organizational effectiveness and employee productivity.”

Other good news in what might be considered a negative environment for federal employees is that 85 percent of employees like the kind of work they do and almost 92 percent think the work they do is important!

High employee satisfaction and engagement is important because it is highly correlated with organizational effectiveness and employee productivity. This will not surprise most people. Most of us know that employees who don’t like their job and/or who don’t like their boss are rarely going to give their best effort to that job.

So, why did federal employees not report an overall drop in their own job satisfaction and level of engagement in the midst of a number of negative developments that are likely to affect their pay, benefits, and working conditions?

An educated guess is that federal employees have been able to tune out much of the negativity by focusing on getting their job done and – perhaps to some extent – the knowledge that they still have a job at a time of high unemployment and tough economic times.

Responses to other survey questions also suggest another factor that may have helped and that is an increase in the regard that employees have for their supervisors and leaders. For example, when asked “Overall, how good a job is being done by your immediate supervisor/team leader?” almost 70 percent (69.3) gave a positive response in 2011 which is up from the 66.2 percent in 2008.

Similarly, when asked if they had “a high level of respect for my organization’s senior leaders,” 56.6 percent of respondents gave a positive response in 2011 which is up from the 52.1 percent who gave that response in 2008. So it would seem that federal leaders and supervisors are finding ways to better engage with their employees at a time when federal employees increasingly need that support and encouragement.

John Palguta is vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service and a member of Breaking Gov’s Editorial Advisory Council