Cover Story

Every Employee Has a Voice at the Postal Service

The Voice of the Employee (VOE) survey is the Postal Service’s™ measure of employee engagement. What is employee engagement? Engagement is the extent to which people enjoy and believe in what they do, and feel valued for doing it. It is a positive attitude held by the employee toward the organization and its values that influences employees to invest and spend discretionary effort to help the organization succeed. High levels of employee engagement drive desirable organizational out­comes such as customer satisfaction, productivity, safety, and talent retention.

Each quarter, 25 percent of employees are invited to take the survey and give their feedback on key drivers of employee engagement such as trust, communication, and respect. Survey participation is voluntary and completely confidential — employees can fill out their surveys on the clock and mail them directly to a third-party vendor who tabulates and summarizes the results. Groups with less than ten responses are combined with the responses in the next higher level. No one in the Postal Service can identify individual respondents.

Last quarter, over 71,000 employees let their opinions be heard through the VOE survey. Survey feedback is used to identify improvement opportunities and measure our progress over time. Quarter two VOE surveys are being mailed out now. Employees who receive a survey are highly encouraged to confidentially complete it and send it in by February 20th.