Fewer federal bureaucrats express confidence in their bosses, survey suggests

OTTAWA — Confidence federal public servants have in their senior managers has fallen in recent years, a new survey suggests.

The 2024 Public Service Employee Survey said 55 per cent of public servants have confidence in senior management at their department or agency, down from 64 per cent in 2022 and 68 per cent in 2020.

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Almost two-thirds of respondents in the new survey said senior managers in their department or agency model ethical behaviour.

Almost half said they make effective and timely decisions, and that essential information flows effectively from senior management to staff.

The survey results have been released as the public service awaits Prime Minister Mark Carney plans to transform the public service.

Carney said in his election platform that his government will cap, not cut, the public service and take steps to increase its productivity.

The employee survey indicates that public servants have fewer concerns about their immediate managers, with 80 per cent of respondents saying they’re satisfied with the quality of supervision they receive.

David McLaughlin, executive editor of Canadian Government Executive Media and former president and CEO of the Institute on Governance, said there appears to be a general “softening” in scores for senior management since the pandemic.

McLaughlin said the pandemic was stressful for the federal public service.

“Likely causes are delivery fatigue coming from the government asking public servants to deliver more and faster, with a lot of shifting priorities and demands coming from the top,” he said.

McLaughlin said most public servants likely would welcome a stronger demand for “performance excellence” from senior management.

“Replacing poor performers on their own without addressing the systemic process and technology roadblocks to good performance, though, would not be welcomed,” he said. “What most public servants want is empowerment to do their jobs in the best way they can, without political or bureaucratic sand in the gears.”

Former clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick said public servants have tended to feel more positive about their immediate supervisors than senior management.

Wernick said about a quarter of the respondents in the most recent survey would be people hired in the last five years. He said their experience is “all pandemic and post pandemic” and also includes the recent labour strike and disputes about work-from-home policies.

“It could be that (working from home) for about half of the service has made senior management seem even more distant than they already do,” he said. “More recently, they are the people who enforced return-to-work policies and the first budget cutting in a decade.”

The 2024 survey also found that close to a quarter of employees say they experience high or very high levels of stress at work. Thirty-nine per cent said they experience moderate levels of stress.

In 2022, 19 per cent of employees said they experienced high or very high levels of stress at work and 37 per cent said they experienced moderate levels of stress.

In the most recent survey, 59 per cent of public servants described their workplace as “psychologically healthy,” a drop from 68 per cent in 2022 and 2020.

The 2024 survey ran from Oct. 28, 2024, to Dec. 31, 2024 and surveyed 186,635 employees in 93 federal departments and agencies, for a response rate of 50.5 per cent.

It was administered by Statistics Canada in partnership with the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 30, 2025.

Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press