National Partnership for Reinventing Government Series

Investigator(s): United States Office of Personnel Management

The National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) (formerly National Performance Review) survey gathered feedback to help agencies focus on key employee satisfaction issues, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government service and thereby better serve customers, and to assess the progress of agencies' organizational changes -- especially in relation to efforts to reinvent internal operations. NPR sought to use the survey results to produce a federal government that worked better and cost less. The NPR survey was originally developed by an interagency team of survey experts from the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The 32-item survey was designed to assess employee opinions on workplace attitudes and the progress of reinvention within the federal workplace. About half of the items on the survey were taken from OPM's organizational assessment survey. This survey has a database of over 500,000 federal employees. A key factor in selecting the agencies to participate in the NPR survey was the extent to which their services impacted the public. Thirty-two federal agencies had 90 percent of the federal government's contact with the public. The performance of these high-impact agencies was seen as central to restoring Americans' trust in government. Therefore, in 1998 and 1999, 31 of the high-impact agencies as well as 17 other agencies (48 agencies total) participated in the NPR survey. In 2000, all high-impact agencies as well as 17 other agencies (49 agencies total) participated.