Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey Data Release: Supporting Documentation

If you have any questions, comments or specific feedback related to these datasets, please contact the Public Service Commission's Open Government Secretariat.

Background Information

About the Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey

The Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey (SNPS) was introduced in 2018 as a biennial public service-wide survey, replacing the Survey of Staffing (SOS) in light of changes brought about by the implementation of the New Direction in Staffing. The primary objective of the SNPS is to collect public servants’ perceptions of the federal staffing system, of the political impartiality of the public service, and their knowledge of their rights and obligations in engaging in political activities. Conducting the survey on a regular basis provides the Public Service Commission of Canada (PSC) and delegated departments with a clear view of areas for improvement, as well as what is working well.

The survey will provide vital information to managers, human resources advisors and deputy heads to improve staffing within their own organizations, and to the PSC on the staffing system as a whole. The information will also be used to support reporting to Parliament via the PSC's Annual Report.

The SNPS targets all departments and agencies under the Public Service Employment Act. The SNPS gathers information from a broader range of audiences — employees, hiring managers and staffing advisors — on key aspects of the staffing system (for example, merit). As in previous years, the survey also gathers critical information on employees’ understanding of their rights and responsibilities regarding political activities and non-partisanship. In 2023, questions were added regarding biases and barriers in staffing processes. For this cycle, results are only provided for in-scope respondents (i.e. term and indeterminate employees).

The information gathered in the survey will be used to identify current and emerging trends at government-wide and organizational levels, to inform potential improvements to staffing policies and practices, and better target efforts to safeguard non-partisanship within the federal public service.

Please visit the Public Service Commission’s Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey tools on the Data Visualization Hub to access the interactive visualisation tools that make use of the data in this collection.

This data release

This data release is comprised of the findings from the third cycle of the SNPS.

Data collection took place over a period of approximately 8 weeks — between September 20, 2023, and November 17, 2023. The survey targeted employees, hiring managers, and staffing advisors to gather their views on a wide range of staffing-related topics, including perceptions on merit, fairness, and transparency in the staffing process, organizational staffing policies and practices, as well as political activities and non-partisanship.

Invitations to complete the survey were sent to 273 186 public servants across 77 departments and agencies subject to the Public Service Employment Act. A total of 84 741 in-scope employees completed the survey, representing an overall response rate of 31.7%.

The survey frame was made up of all employees that were on the employee lists provided by in-scope organizations.

Quality assurance

This data release has been subject to a comprehensive quality review.

All SNPS questions require a minimum of 10 valid responses. Results are not shown when there is an insufficient number of valid in-scope responses.      

Since the SNPS includes a number of branching and skip patterns targeting different groups of respondents, the number of questions each respondent is answering varies with the type of staffing process being reported. An example would be a hiring manager reporting they did not hire or attempt to hire an employee reporting to them, who would not answer questions concerning what processes they have used to hire.

Consequently, the number of valid responses per question may vary within the same organization.

Sampling and collection

This survey is a census with a repeated cross-sectional design. Responding to it was voluntary and the data was collected directly from the survey respondents. Each federal employee receiving a survey invitation (that is, a sampling unit) was contacted by email and invited to complete an electronic questionnaire.

Interpretation of survey results

The data in this release has been weighted to adjust for non-response. Therefore, the results can be generalized to the federal public service population in departments and agencies that are subject to the Public Service Employment Act.

Results are shown as counts and percentages for 2 categories of responses:

1. “yes” or “no”
2. “not at all”; to a minimal extent”; “to a moderate extent”; or “to a great extent”

For all of the above, “don’t know”, “not applicable”, “not stated”, and “valid skip” responses are excluded except for select questions related to priority entitlement where “don’t know” is included.

Both the weighted number of responses and the weighted percentages for each of a question’s response values are given. The weighted number of respondents are rounded to the nearest whole number.

To protect the confidentiality of respondents, results are only provided for questions with at least 10 unweighted respondents.

Dataset Documentation

By department (including all departments) (CFPPSC_SNPS01)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Contains responses to all questions.

By department and by Employment Equity Group: Women (CFPPSC_SNPS02)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Employment equity response comparison between women, men, and another gender.

By department and by Employment Equity Group: Persons with disabilities (CFPPSC_SNPS03)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Employment equity response comparison between persons with disabilities and persons without disabilities.

By department and by Employment Equity Group: Visible minorities (CFPPSC_SNPS04)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Employment equity response comparison between members of visible minorities and employees who are not members of visible minorities.

By department and by Employment Equity Group: Indigenous Peoples (CFPPSC_SNPS05)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Employment equity response comparison between Indigenous Peoples and Non-Indigenous Peoples

By department and by First Official Language (CFPPSC_SNPS06)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada

By department and by Region (CFPPSC_SNPS07)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada

By department and by Occupational group (CFPPSC_SNPS08)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada

By department and by Age group (CFPPSC_SNPS09)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada

By department and by Years of Service (CFPPSC_SNPS10)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada

By department and by Tenure (CFPPSC_SNPS11)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Dataset contains aggregations by indeterminate and term tenures.

Data Visualization Dataset (CFPPSC_SNPS12)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Dataset contains aggregations for all in-scope respondents for all questions including select demographic data. Also, merit, fairness, and transparency data by hiring managers, non-hiring managers, employees, employees (excluding managers and supervisors) and by employment equity group for employees, employees (excluding managers and supervisors) are available. Priority entitlement data is also available for hiring managers and non-hiring managers.

Response profile data (CFPPSC_SNPS13)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Contains each organization’s total count of employees in the data frame and overall response numbers.

List of questions (CFPPSC_SNPS14)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada

List of departments (CFPPSC_SNPS15)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada

By department and by diploma (CFPPSC_SNPS16)

• Source: Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey, Public Service Commission of Canada
• Note: Tracks the highest level of education attained by survey respondents.

Glossary