Release date: 12/8/2015

WASHINGTON, DC – For a third time in a decade, the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS)  today received the top rating among Federal government small agencies as being a “best place to work,” according to rankings released by the Partnership for Public Service.

“We are delighted at this recognition of a very special workplace,” said FMCS Director Allison Beck. “This result is proof, once again, of the strong commitment among FMCS employees to our standards of excellence and to our vital mission of helping to resolve workplace conflict.”

Under Director Beck, the FMCS last year began a re-organization and re-structuring initiative called “Securing the Future of FMCS Together,” which has emphasized employee engagement, inclusion, and new ways to inspire creativity, teamwork, innovation, and service delivery. At FMCS, Beck said, “We are making it a priority to live by the values we espouse, both with our customers and our employees—open communications, transparency, and joint problem-solving.”

FMCS was recognized at a Partnership for Public Service news conference Tuesday  for its number one ranking in 2015, which also rated FMCS the highest in several individual categories, including “Employee Skills-Mission Match,” “Empowerment,”  “Innovation,” “Work-Life Balance,” and “Support for Diversity.” The agency achieved second-place rankings in “Leaders,” “Supervisors,” “Pay,” and “Teamwork,” based on employee responses to survey questions.

FMCS headed the list of small agencies in the 2015 rankings of the “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” as rated by the nonprofit, nonpartisan group, which released its rankings of Federal workplaces today. The rankings are based on responses from more than 433,300 civil servants in 391 Federal organizations.

Produced by the Partnership and Deloitte, the Best Places to Work rankings provide critical information to help agencies, the Obama administration and Congress assess workplace health and performance. In addition to overall satisfaction and commitment, the rankings measure employee attitudes on 10 workplace categories, including effective leadership, innovation, support for diversity, work-life balance and pay.

Agencies are ranked based on the responses of their own employees to the government-wide, Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey conducted by the Office of Personnel Management.

Based on previous surveys, the FMCS was the top-ranked “best place to work” among small agencies in 2005 and 2007.  The rankings began in 2003, and since 2007 have been conducted annually. The FMCS generally has scored among the top five finishers for small agencies in every year that Agency results were available for comparison.

Complete 2015 rankings and information about the survey are available at the Partnership for Public Service website at http://bestplacestowork.org/BPTW/index.php.

For a PDF version of the FMCS release, click here.