Issue Briefs

Following are statements recently released by both OPM and OMB on administration personnel initiatives.

From OPM:

Through his Management Agenda, President Obama is committed to delivering a smarter, more innovative and more accountable government for the American people.

We have had the honor to take a leading role with the “People and Culture” portion of the agenda – a portion we believe is the cornerstone of the agenda. Why? Because an engaged, innovative, and productive Federal workforce is the key to everything we do in service to America. And last week, we released our detailed Agency Priority Goal action plan on how we plan to improve the Federal workforce both for today and for tomorrow.

Within this action plan, we are taking a three-pronged approach to make sure the Federal government successfully unlocks the talent of the workforce we have today and builds the workforce we need for the future. Through these efforts, we believe we will be able to create a culture of excellence and engagement that will foster higher performance; an exemplary Federal management team, starting with the Senior Executive Service; and innovative recruiting tools that allow agencies to attract the best talent from every segment of society.

We’d like to describe for you these important elements of the People and Culture pillar.

Driving Employee Engagement: We need to draw on the varied talent, expertise and experience of our great workforce, and to do that, we need to give our employees some new tools:

* We will use the valuable responses to our Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to provide agencies with more than 13,000 individual unit-level reports. FEVS data will start to be available in August, a month earlier than usual. Along with the reports, agencies will have a new interactive dashboard allowing them to mine the data for insights into better engagement strategies and learn best practices for driving specific outcomes from best-in-class managers.

* With the launch of GovConnect, we are encouraging agencies to let employees step out of their usual roles and responsibilities to collaborate on innovative solutions to longstanding problems.

Building a World-Class Management Team: Starting with the Senior Executive Service, we will position our management team to provide the highest level of leadership within and across Departments and Agencies.

* We will work with Department and Agencies to implement an improved cross-Government SES onboarding model, developed by the President’s Leadership Workshop and a number of career SES, to help Senior Executives “hit the ground running,” and will commit to and prioritize continual SES development to give them the leadership tools they need throughout their service.

* OPM will work with Agencies to improve and streamline their processes for recruiting and hiring SES to increase our ability to attract and hire world-class talent from all segments of society.

Finding the Best Talent: Working with stakeholders, OPM is meeting with agency and department heads and untying the “knots” getting in their way of recruiting the talent they need.

* We are focusing on improving the quality and diversity of our hires and increasing the involvement of hiring managers to complement the previous emphasis to reduce the time to hire.

* We are working with our partners in the Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council and with Diversity and Inclusion Directors to find the best recruitment and outreach strategies and to fully utilize existing hiring flexibilities and approaches. And we’ll become a full player in today’s digital employment marketplace by expanding our use of social media.

* OPM is identifying ways to better use data that tracks hiring needs and applicant flow to drive recruitment strategies and measure success.

These initiatives of the People and Culture pillar were developed over the past year by some of the most senior officials in government through the President’s Management Council along with staff from all agencies.

We want to thank our teams at OPM and the Presidential Personnel Office as well as our agency partners, the CHCO council, the President’s Leadership Workshop, and the Office of Management and Budget for what we know will be their tireless efforts to implement this ambitious action plan. Furthermore, we invite your feedback as we move forward given this will be a living agenda. I know that together, we will make sure that the Federal government is a model for the 21st Century.

From OMB:

Cross-Agency Priority goals address the longstanding challenge of tackling horizontal problems across vertical organizational silos. 15 Cross-Agency Priority Goals were announced in the 2015 Budget, these include 7 mission-oriented and 8 management-focused goals with a 4-year time horizon. To establish these goals, OMB solicited nominations from Federal agencies and several congressional committees.

The Federal Government’s workforce is the most critical ingredient to driving the success of its priority initiatives. We cannot focus on improvement in processes without a complementary focus on the people we rely on to do the work. Though changes to policy or law may ultimately be needed to address workforce and cultural challenges across government, we can and should take actions to maximize the impact of our workforce within the existing environment. We propose to:

* Create a Culture of Excellence and Engagement to Enable Higher Performance. We will foster a culture of excellence by using data-driven approaches to enhance management, performance, and innovation across the current Federal workforce. Specifically, we will focus on employee engagement (measured by employee views about their leaders, supervisors, and work experience), as multiple evaluations have demonstrated a strong correlation between employee engagement and an organization’s productivity. Agencies can now get access to this data for over 13,000 work-level units across the country (up from just a few hundred units four years ago). This level of specificity in data will provide agency managers with actionable information to target areas where improvement is needed most and where there are management best practices that can provide a model for success.

* Build a World-Class Federal Management Team Starting with the Senior Executive Service (SES). To ensure a first-class Federal workforce long-term, we will invest in our civil service leadership by taking administrative actions that result in a broader experience and skill base across the Federal Executive Corps. This includes addressing the “pain points” in the hiring process and enhancing training and accountability over the terms of their service.

* Enable Agencies to Hire the Best Talent from All Segments of Society. We will collaborate with Federal stakeholders and labor groups to ensure a balanced strategic approach to improving hiring outcomes. In the short term, we will identify and address the erosion of the original flexibilities of Title 5. In the long term, we will work closely with labor unions and use demonstration projects and/or legislation and regulatory changes to ensure that our hiring processes attract and retain America’s talent. We will measure the success of this effort by assessing manager satisfaction with the quality of both applicants and their hires after six months on the job.