How to Effectively Communicate Government Workforce Reforms
“One of the biggest issues is people not understanding what’s happening, especially when there is transition and there is a new set of priorities for the organization. So having a communication strategy for which HR is part of the discussion with all the key stakeholders in the organization is key.” Bettina Deynes
Vice President of Human Resources and Diversity at the Society for Human Resource Management
A GovLoop Guide 2
Executive Summary
4 Overview of Workforce Reforms
Change can be hard, uncomfortable and downright overwhelming. Even planning for it can cause angst.
5 Communicating Workforce Changes
Maybe it’s new leadership at your agency, uncertainty about your current and future role, or perhaps you’ve been asked to manage a major project at work. Whether big or small, change is personal and often requires us to step outside of our comfort zone.
7 Overcoming Barriers to HR Software Adoption
At the federal level, workforce reforms are one of the biggest human capital changes that agencies face right now. They are responding to an April Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo that calls on agencies to plan for near- and long-term reductions across the civilian workforce.
11 Improve Your Technology to Improve Your Workforce
Although the mandates for workforce reforms are not as drastic across state and local governments, hiring managers are working through their own challenges, including recruiting and retaining employees and shaping their future workforces as seasoned professionals retire. To help employees navigate these changes, effective communication must work its way from the top down. Senior leaders must be in lockstep with mid-level managers and human resources professionals to clearly articulate what’s happening, why it’s happening and how changes will affect employees. In this GovLoop guide, we provide an overview of key workforce reforms happening at all levels of government, specific examples of how they are playing out nationwide and tips for effectively communicating those changes to employees. The areas of focus include: • Hiring and reductions • Employee training • Succession planning • Streamlining HR functions with IT • Buyouts and retirement You’ll also hear from government managers and HR professionals about their efforts to lead employees through change. But first, let’s briefly review the major federal workforce reforms and changes at the state and local levels that are gaining traction.
CONTENTS
8 Hiring and Reductions
12 Employee Training 13 Succession Planning 15 Why Your Agency Needs Talent Intelligence 16 Tackling Human Capital With Issues IT 19 Taking a New Approach to Employee Recruitment and Retention 20 Buyouts and Retirement 22 Making the Case for Modern HR Management Tools 24 Conclusion 25 Worksheet: Self Assessment Questions for Agency Leadership 26 About and Acknowledgments
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Overview of Workforce Reforms FEDERAL
STATE & LOCAL
Among the key issues that federal agencies will have to hash out in the coming months and years is workforce management, including rethinking when and whom they hire, boosting employee performance and using technology to improve internal processes.
Similar to federal agencies, state and local employees are feeling the fiscal pinch. They have fewer resources on hand, and yet they are being asked to do more, such as build digital services, protect critical data and modernize infrastructure. With the limited budgets they do have, they’re recruiting for hard-to-fill positions, particularly in the tech arena.
Following the months-long hiring freeze that President Donald Trump instituted his third day in office, several agencies adopted short-term fixes. Some continued the hiring drought by enforcing a self-imposed freeze and requiring that any potential new hires receive senior-level approval. As part of their fiscal 2019 budget submissions, agencies submitted draft reform plans to OMB in September 2017. They were instructed to address long-term workforce reductions and a strategy for eliminating activities that are not core to their mission. Part of the dilemma for agencies is that while their workforce is set to shrink, their workload will not always decrease at the same rate. Agencies still need staff to get work done at a time when hiring is in flux. “You actually have a lot of disparity among agencies right now in terms of those that are looking to hire and those that are really pulling back,” said Margot Conrad, Director of Education and Outreach at the Partnership for Public Service. For example, amid efforts to downsize the federal workforce, there is a big push governmentwide to retain and hire entry-level, mid-level and experienced IT management professionals and information security experts. “The big challenge we’re seeing is agencies really need to focus on how to retain their top performers, especially if they’re in a period of time when they may not be able to do a lot of new hiring,” Conrad said. “It’s really important to be figuring out ways to challenge and motivate your current workforce, to recognize and appreciate your workforce, and really take those steps to try to retain those top performers.”
In its 2017 State and Local Government Workforce survey, the Center for State and Local Government Excellence (SLGE) found that recruitment, retention, staff and leadership development, and succession planning are high priorities for government officials. Overall, state and local governments reported a decrease in hiring freezes, layoffs, pay freezes and furloughs, and several states and cities are stabilizing financially after weathering the economic downturn in 2010. The focus now is on preparing the current workforce for the future and determining what skills will be needed as technology advances and automation replaces manual processes. For instance, in Washington state, former Chief Information Officer Michael Cockrill held biweekly hiring reviews for his team to consider where they would place new employees if they were able to expand their teams. For government HR professionals in particular, the focus is on serving as a strategic partner to help C-suite executives like Cockrill manage workforce changes. Bettina Deynes, former Director of Human Resources for the city of Alexandria, Virginia, agrees. “One of the biggest issues is people not understanding what’s happening, especially when there is transition and there is a new set of priorities for the organization,” said Deynes, who now serves as Vice President of Human Resources and Diversity at the Society for Human Resource Management. “So having a communication strategy for which HR is part of the discussion with all the key stakeholders in the organization [is crucial].”
A GovLoop Guide 4
Communicating Workforce Changes Government employees are bombarded with changes every day that affect how they work, what that work consists of and what their jobs will look like in the future. But too often those changes are not effectively communicated to employees at all levels of the organization. That’s why HR professionals must ensure workforce changes are shared in a timely, clear and consistent manner. In this section, we’ll take a closer look at reform as it relates to hiring and reductions, succession planning, streamlining HR functions with IT, and buyouts and retirement. Each section includes an overview of the issue, how it’s playing out at the federal, state and local levels, and practical ways that HR can communicate changes with employees.
MEET THE EXPERTS To better understand government’s key HR challenges, we heard from current and former public-sector employees who are knowledgeable about current workforce issues. Keith Brainard
Ray Limon
Research Director at the National Association of State Retirement Administrators
HR Director and Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer at the Interior Department
Jeffrey Neal
Margot Conrad
Director of Education and Outreach at the Partnership for Public Service
Bettina Deynes
Vice President of Human Resources and Diversity at the Society for Human Resource Management
Jonathan Feldman
Chief Information Officer, Asheville, North Carolina
Elias Hernandez
former Chief Human Capital Officer at the Homeland Security Department
Town Manager of Cary, North Carolina
John Sullivan
Deputy Secretary at the State Department
Pamela Thompson
Tom Ross
President of the nonprofit Volcker Alliance
Senior Organizational Culture Advisor at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Leo Scanlon
Jenti Vandertuig
Deputy Chief Information Security Officer at the Health and Human Services Department
Rich Schliep
Chief Human Capital Officer at the Small Business Administration
Sean Stegall
Chief Information Security Officer and Network Manager at the Colorado Department of State
Chief Procurement Officer for Santa Clara County, California
Melissa Wideman
Section Chief of Workforce Planning and Performance for Washington’s State Human Resources division
Peter Shelby
Assistant Secretary for the Veterans Affairs Department’s Office of Human Resources and Administration
How to Effectively Communicate Government Workforce Reforms 5
HR SOFTWARE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT
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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT
Overcoming Barriers to HR Software Adoption An interview with Jonathan Wiersma, General Manager of Human Resources Solutions at CivicPlus There’s a growing appetite among the government human resources community for technology that automates manual processes and empowers employees to make data-driven decisions.
marking a distinct shift for government agencies. This change requires that HR has the technology and data in place to properly track employee performance in a transparent and consistent manner.
But these aren’t the only demands driving software purchases across government HR departments. In a recent interview with GovLoop, Jonathan Wiersma, General Manager of HR Solutions at CivicPlus, an integrated technology platform for local government, shared key drivers that are influencing tech adoption among HR professionals.
The final driver shaping HR software purchases is the need to replace aging tools, some of which are decades old. Maintaining these resource-intensive systems hinders HR departments from embracing all that new and emerging technologies have to offer. They’ve had to delay investments in new software to keep existing operations running, but that arrangement has proven costly for agencies struggling to attract tech-savvy employees.
In terms of key drivers that are influencing software adoption in the HR community, the first and most impactful is a change in leadership. Whether it’s a new city council member or county administrator, their priorities weigh heavily on tech investments geared toward personnel issues. Specifically, Wiersma has noticed an increased focus by government leadership on organizational effectiveness, which in turn influences HR software purchases and ultimately rank-and file-employees. “We’re seeing some of those leadership shifts that are more focused on performance and goals,” he said. Those performance goals impact overall organizational effectiveness and affect how leaders manage their employees. Leaders aren’t just talking about performance, they’re working with HR professionals to develop measurable goals for tracking progress across the workforce. Compared with years past, more local governments are requiring employees to undergo performance evaluations, Wiersma said. Some states are taking performance a step further and tying it to employee pay,
After years of waiting, HR departments are finally taking the leap to modernize their back-office systems, thanks to lower-cost technology options that allow agencies to make investments gradually rather than ripping out old technology and replacing it all at once. Migrating from a paperbased talent management system to an automated, cloud-based solution is one way that budget-strapped municipalities are able to quickly realize a positive ROI based on incremental improvements to their day-to-day HR processes. But no technology transformation is immune to challenges. As HR departments adopt these new solutions, they’re also grappling with generational gaps, as well as time and resource constraints. “We see generational gaps where the folks who are doing the work are less interested in change than the folks who are making the decisions at the top of the organization,” Wiersma said. Employees who have worked at the agency for decades are used to doing business a specific way with certain tools.
“Meanwhile, you have new employees coming on who are shocked that they have to fill out a paper job application and can’t believe they need to write their Social Security number a dozen times on different forms,” Wiersma said. To bridge this generational gap, Wiersma and his team at CivicPlus, promote a collaborative approach to technology adoption. “Our approach to make government work better is not by offering just the tools, but by offering professional guidance,” he said. “Our project managers are trained to ask what steps in a particular process are needed before building a solution for the staff.” As part of CivicPlus, CivicHR provides easy-to-use HR solutions for local government that streamline hiring and onboarding. CivicHR provides agencies with seamless implementation and integration and customized training for all users. The city of Marble Falls, Texas is one example. Using CivicHR, the city’s Human Resources Director, Angel Alvarado, cut the resume review process from weeks to days. The system automatically routes qualified applicants to the appropriate department manager for review. That meant Alvarado no longer had to make multiple copies of qualified resumes, deliver them to the appropriate people for review, and follow up with them for feedback. Since moving to an online system with CivicHR, Alvarado has seen an increase in total applications and higher quality applicants for most positions. Going digital not only accelerated the hiring process but also improved the user experience for job applicants. When agencies invest in intuitive HR software, it creates a win-win for hiring managers and potential employees.
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Hiring & Workforce Reductions Reducing the size and cost of government is a priority for the Trump administration. Meanwhile, state and local governments are focused on retaining and recruiting employees. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT What’s Happening
The Response
At the federal level, you’re likely to hear terms such as modernizing, optimizing and reshaping — instead of downsizing, cuts and layoffs — to describe the administration’s workforce reforms.
The National Cemetery Administration consolidated all HR functions into a single location in Indianapolis. It’s now the workforce model toward which the Veterans Affairs Department is heading as a whole, said Peter Shelby, Assistant Secretary for VA’s Office of Human Resources and Administration.
Hiring managers and HR professionals are cautious in the way they craft the message of major personnel changes taking shape across federal agencies. But that hasn’t eased tension and uncertainty as agencies look to reduce the size and cost of the federal workforce. Three days into his role as commanderin-chief, Trump ordered a hiring freeze of federal civilian employees. As promised, OMB followed up with an April 12 memo. The memo tasks agencies with developing plans to reduce the civilian workforce, maximize employee performance and focus on opportunities to eliminate activities, or restructure and merge them. The plans were to include input from the public and government employees, and will be used to create a governmentwide reform strategy for publication in the president’s fiscal 2019 budget.
The department moved its customerfacing HR services out of the D.C. area because VA couldn’t compete for talent, Shelby said during a September GovExec event, where he was joined by leaders from Interior and the Small Business Administration. Shuttering that office meant 40 people no longer had jobs, but Shelby said VA is placing all of them in new positions. The 380,000-employee department has an internal personnel placement office working with VA organizations to put displaced employees in vacant positions. At Interior, the agency will rely on attrition to move future positions geographically so that employees are closer to the department’s stakeholders,
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many of whom are out West, said Ray Limon, HR Director and Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer at Interior. Interior came under scrutiny this summer for abruptly reassigning dozens of Senior Executive Service personnel. Limon said the move was part of an effort to position the department for its future workforce needs. That involved moving people to different jobs — some within the same area, and some in different geographic locations. Although many agencies plan to shrink the size of their workforce, some are expected to see surges in hiring, particularly the Homeland Security Department. SBA is also hiring, but there’s an executive team that reviews every proposed hiring action to ensure it aligns with the agency’s reform plan, said Elias Hernandez, SBA’s CHCO.
STATE & LOCAL GOVERNMENT What’s Happening
The Response
While federal agencies look to decrease the size of the workforce, state and local governments are doing just the opposite. Recruiting and retaining qualified personnel is a top priority, according to SLGE’s 2017 workforce trends survey.
Washington state is an example of the gains being made at other levels of government. The state saw an increase in new hires and promotions compared with last year, and a four-year decline in the number of layoffs — a total of 22 in fiscal 2017.
The report found that 74 percent of the 283 respondents said they hired employees in the past year. “This is slightly below the 77 percent reported in 2016, but well ahead of the 27 percent in 2013 and 66 percent in 2014,” according to the survey. Similar to federal agencies, state and local governments are having a tough time filling IT positions. They’re also short on police officers, engineers and healthcare professionals, the SLGE report found. The survey noted that the skills in highest demand include interpersonal, written communications, technology and management.
In Santa Clara County, California, Director of Procurement Jenti Vandertuig has watched her team grow from 24 employees in 2004 to 74 today. That growth came as her department took on more high-profile projects, including streamlining and automating the county’s procurement functions. She’s focused on how employees’ technical skills complement their soft skills, and how that fits into the department’s overarching vision. The key to building and retaining a strong team is knowing what people are good at, she said. You have to build a culture in which people can tackle
challenging issues while focusing on growth areas and new projects. Officials in Cary, North Carolina, are preparing the workforce for a slowdown of new hires. “I come from a background where organizations had to do layoffs, and Cary has never experienced layoffs,” said Town Manager Sean Stegall. “My No. 1 obligation is to try to create as much job security as possible.” His approach is to tap into existing resources and give current employees the opportunity to take on different roles and projects, before hiring new employees. “It has certainly been a shift,” Stegall said. “This requires lots of explanations and requires me to base everything on [the] human element. Efficiency and effectiveness is secondary.”
TIPS FOR COMMUNICATING WITH EMPLOYEES Communicate — a lot. The key is getting ahead of the rumors. If you don’t, people will explain to themselves what is going on. You’ve got to help them get the right explanation.
Maintain a recruiting presence.
Keep the discussion going.
Even if hiring is slow or at a standstill, you will eventually need to replace people who leave. You have to have a pipeline. You have to have an array of people who at least know that you are potentially recruiting. They might take another job in the meantime, but they’re on your list, and you’re on their list.
When leaders or HR professionals don’t feel they have all the information, the tendency is to stay quiet. Instead, they should share as much information as possible. Communicating how HR can be a valuable resource to employees and where they can go to ask questions is also important.
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Be mobile. Management by walking around is an extremely valuable tool. Make it a priority to meet people, and show a genuine interest in who they are and what they do for the organization. It matters to them, and it should matter to managers.
Unified Talent Management for Government From recruitment, onboarding, learning and collaboration, to performance management, compensation, succession planning and analytics, Cornerstone’s cloud-based unified talent management systems help government organizations to recruit, retain and grow the next generation of leaders.
Learn more csod.com/state-local csod.com/federal-government
INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT
Improve Your Technology to Improve Your Workforce An interview with Jim Gill, Vice President, Government at Cornerstone OnDemand Today’s government HR professionals face a series of challenges. Confronted with the realities of an aging workforce and the need to onboard a new generation of employees, agencies can’t afford to act inefficiently. According to a 2017 survey by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, 91 percent of the HR managers who responded ranked recruiting and retaining qualified personnel as the most pressing issue they face. So, how can these professionals get a better handle on predicting their agencies’ needs? For a growing number of HR departments, the answer lies in cloud-based unified talent management systems. These cloud solutions have become increasingly beneficial to agencies that are maintaining outdated systems. GovLoop sat down recently with Jim Gill, Vice President, Government, at Cornerstone, which specializes in cloudbased talent management technologies, to discuss this and more. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen an increased demand for modernizing HR solutions and for moving to cloud-based technology,” Gill said. “These solutions help agencies to optimize their recruiting processes by giving hiring managers access to real-time predictive analytics around their talent pools. Agencies that have made the switch are better able to track, manage and report on human capital management and employee training.” Predictive analytics play a crucial role in these facets of government HR because they provide informed views into the likeliest future outcomes based on historical activities and trends. These advancements are invaluable to agencies and employees alike.
For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is seeing the benefits of a modernized, unified talent management system. By pulling disparate aspects of HR into a single system, the SEC’s HR managers are better able to easily identify both high-potential employees and employee skills gap. “The SEC has built out the human capital data repository in our enterprise data warehouse (EDW),” said SEC Chief Human Capital Officer Lacey Dingman in a recent interview with FedNewsRadio.“So having that raw data stored in our EDW gives us a lot of leverage and opportunities and options on how we want to continue to modernize and enhance this overall lifecycle talent management system for the agency.” Technology isn’t the only aspect of public sector HR facing imminent modernization. The size and age of the government workforce are also undergoing major changes. Compared to the private sector workforce, the public sector is presently made up of a relatively small percentage of millennials — around a quarter, per Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, it’s likely the younger generation will overtake baby boomers as the majority in the coming years. This shift will present new challenges, including the management of knowledge transfers from seasoned professionals to new employees and the fulfillment of millennials’ vastly different expectations for work and how to get it done. One of the ways in which agencies can modernize the workplace itself, Gill said, is by adopting a more holistic approach to training and development. Agencies are moving to new platforms that enable
them to provide consistent, on-demand, and customized learning content. Those agencies that place more emphasis on continuous learning will find employees more nimble and adaptable as a result. Cornerstone is helping agencies implement unified talent management systems to cover the entire employee lifecycle, tying learning initiatives to performance, hiring, on-boarding and succession. “Additional benefits of unified talent management systems are the social dynamic networks they create,” Gill explained. Traditional organizational charts neither reflect the relationships within organizations, nor show how work within those organizations is completed. They also fail to show who has informal or authoritative leadership, he said. Dynamic networks, however, can paint more nuanced pictures of agencies, complete with information about how peers collaborate. “Technology skills and workforce demographics are shifting and evolving at a rapid pace,” Gill said. “We believe that the new generation will want tools, processes and networks established, so they can get the information they need to be empowered to make decisions, and take charge of their own professional learning.” To be competitive in today’s world of work, public sector organizations need to identify top talent, capitalize on trends within their workforces and make data-driven decisions to shape their future workforces. It is no longer enough for agencies to simply provide learning management systems to their employees. Instead, government should utilize the workforce data they have to make their agencies a better place to work.
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Employee Training Training budgets are often seen as nice-to-haves. But at a time when agencies are expected to increase performance while reducing the size and cost of their workforce, training is a necessity. When advocating for training resources, former DHS Chief Human Capital Officer (CHCO) Jeffrey Neal suggested the first thing employees and managers do is make the argument that cutting training is short-sighted and bad for business. Neal’s advice: Don’t be bashful about saying to the people who are making those decisions that their employees might think they are not telling the truth if they say people are the most important resource and the first thing they cut is people. Many employers have recognized that investing in employee development can result in many organizational benefits, including boosts to employee morale and improved efficiency and productivity.
HOW TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF FREE TRAINING Maybe the training and professional development budget dried up. Maybe you weren’t asked to work on that new and exciting project. Maybe no one knows your hidden skills. If so, here are some options to consider:
→→ If you’re looking for free professional development, the federal Open Opportunities Program may be the right fit for you. The governmentwide program caters to feds looking for growth opportunities and managers looking for their help. Positions range from marketing projects and event planning to data visualization and blogging.
→→ Another option is free training through iTunes U. Through iTunes U, anyone with an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch can access free educational content, including public courses and collections from leading schools, universities, museums and cultural institutions.
→→ GovLoop offers a variety of free, in-person and online trainings for public-sector employees. Among those offerings are interactive courses offered through GovLoop Academy. The self-paced courses range from 10 minutes to an hour. Most are 30 minutes, and topics include “Introduction to the Internet of Things,” “The Human-Centered Approach” and “Getting the Most of Your Data Analytics.”
TIPS FOR CREATING INTERNAL TRAINING OPPORTUNITIES Provide on-the-job training Be deliberate about the assignments you give employees, and make certain that you tell them those long-term projects are training opportunities. The work should be designed to fill in their skills gaps.
Develop formal mentorship and coaching opportunities
Don’t wait until the budget is reduced.
While mentoring focuses on giving helpful advice, coaching is more action-focused. For example, coaching questions may focus on why you feel you don’t have a good relationship with your boss, rather than telling you how to respond to your boss.
Mission support staff — including those in HR, procurement and finance — are usually hit the hardest when training budgets are cut. Instead, invest your time in creating programs for those employees to get more experience. This doesn’t have to be formal training.
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Succession Planning Succession planning is one of those critical tasks that organizations know they need to do. But few do it well — if at all. To be clear, succession planning isn’t an HR issue; it’s a workforce issue for everyone that takes commitment, planning and thoughtful execution. That’s why the Office of Personnel Management is using feedback from its 2017 Senior Executive Service (SES) Exit Report to improve government succession planning, as well as recruitment, engagement and retention. The survey found that formal succession planning is not the norm for senior-level positions. Sixty-one percent of senior executives leaving government said their agencies had no formal successionplanning efforts for executives, and more than half — 56 percent — said their agency made no efforts to involve them in preparing their successor. This isn’t just an SES problem but one that reaches across the workforce. In Cary, North Carolina, Stegall noticed there was a gap among his 1,200-employee workforce between those with vast amounts of knowledge and those without. That knowledge gap became more pronounced a few months after Stegall became Town Manager. At the time, three seasoned directors announced they were retiring. Their departures were disruptive because they left a deficit in expertise and know-how that mid-level managers were not equipped to fill. “The department directors were very much relied upon to have it all and do it all,” Stegall said. That’s not a sustainable model.
Effective succession planning isn’t easy and takes time, but it’s worth the investment because it helps future-proof your organization for inevitable staff departures. Below we’ve outlined some practical ways that agencies can work with employees on effective succession planning.
Think outside the box. That may mean rethinking current and future job descriptions. Stegall said he recently hired two directors of special projects whose responsibilities are “other duties as assigned.” They are going to go where the need is, and in a couple of years they will know a little about a lot of things instead of focusing on a single department or project. Individuals in this type of role should find questions more comforting than answers, be humble and take satisfaction in the success of a team, have an appreciation for the unknown, and be resilient, Stegall said.
Start preparing readiness candidates. One way is by working with leaders to see who could potentially fill positions before they become vacant. What type of development are those candidates receiving, and have you spoken with them about their aspirations, skills and skills gaps that would preclude them from moving into certain roles? Create a competency-based learning and development model for individual contributors, supervisors and agency heads. The model should make clear what the competencies are for each role.
Identify your exposure in terms of potential skills gaps. What is the impact if key employees retire or resign? How would your agency respond to these events? What plans are in place? For example, does your agency anticipate that the workforce will grow? Will new skills be required?
Determine what development opportunities are in place for employees. If your organization conducts employee engagement surveys, use that data to gauge sentiments about career opportunities and the ability to be promoted. Use the data to drive actions and make improvements.
Review all of your data. The number of retirement-eligible employees isn’t the only data agencies must consider. Part of readiness planning is identifying how many people could leave and when that is most likely to happen. That’s where data analytics comes in.
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FIN D IN G
A ND
GOV ERN MENT GOT
T RA I NI NG
TA L E N T
J UST
E A S I E R
LinkedIn - Now available on the GSA Schedule
Talent Solutions
Learning WITH
Lynda.com® C O N T E N T
business.linkedin.com/us-government A GovLoop Guide 14
INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT
Why Your Agency Needs Talent Intelligence An interview with Eric Owski, Head of Product, Talent Insights and Talent Brand at LinkedIn Recruiting the right talent for the right positions is a critical task that government strives to do well. But it’s easier said than done. Combing through resumes to find standout employees can be a needlein-a-haystack endeavor that’s time and resource intensive, and not always reliable for finding the right candidates. Because the competition for talent is at an all-time high, agencies need a strategic approach to hiring and recruiting. In a recent interview with GovLoop, Eric Owski, Head of Product, Talent Insights and Talent Brand at LinkedIn, shared current trends that are impacting the talent marketplace, how top recruiting organizations are responding to those trends and how LinkedIn fits into this changing landscape. “The biggest trend impacting talent leaders — the people responsible for bringing talent into organizations — is more pressure to leverage data and insights to make decisions,” Owski said. Governments are relying more heavily on data in the midst of a talent shortage for certain knowledge workers, which makes hiring qualified candidates that more challenging. To address these issues, agencies need real-time data and insights to make quick and agile decisions on all talent matters. They need to know where their talent supply is located, how significant the demand is for that talent and how difficult it is to hire in-demand workers, Owski said. But top organizations understand that simply having data is a starting point. The real power lies in sharing data
and insights among recruiters, hiring managers and cross-functional teams that can take action based on the findings. For example, these shared insights can be used to craft relevant job announcements that attract diverse and qualified talent. Longer term, data and insights can have a substantial impact on an organization’s talent acquisition strategy. Let’s say an agency needs to hire 70 IT professionals. Hiring managers would need to know if the market currently supports those types of positions, or if it makes more sense to develop that talent within their organization. To successfully attract skilled workers in this competitive job market, LinkedIn is helping companies tap into their talent intelligence – the use of data and insights to improve every step of the recruitment process. Some of the workforce data that agencies need today is information they already possess. But when it comes to filling gaps and understanding trends in the larger labor market, many organizations are turning to LinkedIn as a trusted source. “LinkedIn is in the position to tap into a rich global dataset, powered by billions of daily member updates, activities and interactions, to provide a dynamic view on rapidly changing market conditions,” Owski said.
“All of those data points are raw materials that we can turn into insights about what’s happening in the labor market,” Owski said. “We see how talent is moving between industries. We see where there are hidden gem opportunities for organizations to find talent that they might not be aware of.” LinkedIn is taking its wealth of real-time data and insights and making them available to enterprise agencies as a self-service analytics capability called LinkedIn Talent Insights. The self-service tool, which is expected to launch in mid-2018, will give talent professionals access to two types of reporting to guide decision making: a talent pool report and a company report. Using the talent pool report, companies can understand where their talent lives and the companies and industries they work for, what schools are producing this talent and how this talent is engaging with the agency on LinkedIn. The company report shows how an agency’s workforce is distributed by function and geography, where it’s gaining talent from and losing talent to and more. The future of recruiting lies in data-driven insights, and agencies must be ready. With sound talent intelligence, they can fundamentally transform their recruiting practices today and well into the future.
LinkedIn has 530 million members with profiles that show their job history, including the organizations they’ve worked for and the skills that they have. There are 18 million companies represented on LinkedIn, 11 million active job listings, and 50,000 standardized skills that have been identified and endorsed more than 11 billion times.
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Tackling Human Capital with IT There’s no shortage of technology to meet government’s most pressing human capital needs. But procuring and integrating those technologies with clunky and outdated systems creates significant challenges for agencies. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT What’s Happening
The Response
In a memo, OMB told federal agencies to look at workflows or positions that new technologies can be automate. The memo mentions database administration, invoice processing, and financial management as potential processes that can be automated or contracted to the private sector.
At the State Department, a recurring theme in employee surveys is shaping workforce reform efforts. Numerous employees expressed frustration with outdated technologies that hinder their ability to collaborate and do minor tasks.
OMB also directed agency leaders to examine ways they can break down silos within agencies and work with outside organizations. “Examples of crosscutting reforms may include areas where market or technology changes allow a service to be delivered more efficiently, such as by a shared service provider, or where multiple federal agencies interact in fragmented or duplicative ways with state, local, and tribal governments or other stakeholders,” according to the memo.
“Forty-one percent of respondents to the survey said that there are tools they require to do their work that are not readily available to them,” Deputy Secretary John Sullivan said in written testimony for a September House committee hearing. “Seventy-five percent of employees reported that they apply workarounds to duplicative, complicated bureaucratic processes at least a few times a year.” State’s proposed reform plan focuses on integrating IT and cybersecurity platforms, modernizing legacy systems and upgrading technology infrastructure so employees can work anywhere, anytime and as effectively as possible, Sullivan
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said. IT is one part of a larger plan that is expected to generate $5 billion in savings over the next five years. VA is also rethinking how it delivers IT services that impact the workforce. The agency is moving toward a selfservice model that will automate about 60 percent of the work that HR employees are doing now. The combination of attrition, new IT capabilities and the creation of regional HR centers will probably shrink VA’s HR workforce by 50 percent, said the department’s Assistant Secretary for the Office of Human Resources and Administration. VA currently has about 7,000 HR professionals. Interior’s Deputy CHCO said there will be opportunities at the department to adopt a shared services model for support services such as HR, IT, budget and acquisition.
STATE & LOCAL GOVERNMENT What’s Happening State and local governments are also making strides to better align HR functions with new technology advances, such as cloud computing and analytics. But adoption varies by state, city and county. Agencies are under pressure to keep pace with internal and external customers’ demands, all while making cybersecurity a top priority, said Rich Schliep, CISO and Network Manager at the Colorado Department of State. They must decide if it makes more sense to spend money on in-house systems to provide common functions for HR or outsource that work to vendors that specialize in those areas.
The Response Jonathan Feldman, Chief Information Officer for the city of Asheville in North Carolina, worked closely with his HR and
finance counterparts to roll out the Google suite of email and collaboration tools to city employees.
agencies better manage HR and respond to requests for HR information by the Legislature, labor unions and the public.
“There are fiscal aspects to this, but really there is an employee toolset aspect to this,” Feldman said about the recent rollout. “We can’t have employees having four different versions of Office productivity software.”
“The ability to use HR data is essential to [the Office of Financial Management] and state agency management in their understanding [of] how state employees are managed, how they are paid and what factors contribute to HR issues like turnover or use of overtime,” according to a description of the project.
He sees investments in technology as a way to make the city an employer of choice for talented professionals, including millennials. His focus is clear: “What can we give these new entrants to the workforce that they really want to have?” “We took it seriously, and we prepared for it like it was a big deal,” Feldman said about the Google project. “It was probably one of the biggest changes in employee workflow in the last decade.” Washington state is migrating to a new enterprise reporting system to help
The state is currently working on a statistical model to predict voluntary resignations, said Melissa Wideman, Section Chief of Workforce Planning and Performance for Washington’s HR office. The goal is to identify what factors are most significant in predicting resignations and what the state can do to retain workers through tools such as salary increases and work flexibilities.
TIPS FOR COMMUNICATING WITH EMPLOYEES Use plain language.
Explain the “so what.”
If you aren’t sure what’s acceptable, use the “mom test.” Consider how you communicate with your mom or even a friend, and use this conversational style to frame your IT and HR discussions when talking to colleagues. Consider what questions they might ask. Anticipate those questions and clearly provide appropriate context.
Employees want to know why they should care and what tech changes mean for them. One way is to frame communications as a Q&A: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How will this impact your job? What actions do you need to take?
Create a change management and communications strategy. Make it a priority to meet people where they feel comfortable. Feldman’s team used multiple channels, including email, blog posts, town halls, manager-employee conversations, department visits and posters to inform staff and address concerns about the Google migration.
Respond to rumors with facts. Don’t let the fear of change linger. For example, in response to rumors that Google Sheets may not integrate with the city’s enterprise resource planning system, the project manager overseeing the transition created a video for employees that explained the integration process and how to do it.
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Show empathy. One reason why change fails is leaders don’t take into account how it affects people personally. In Asheville, the project manager for the Google transition hand-delivered care packages to each of the city’s major sites and emphasized to staff that they were not alone and would have plenty of support throughout the IT project.
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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT
Taking a New Approach to Employee Recruitment and Retention An interview with Laura Glass and Heather Sherlock, Senior Principals, Public Sector at Infor Historically, the public sector has lagged behind the private in adopting innovations in human resource technology. But with baby boomers retiring in droves and millennials trickling in, innovations in the field are imperative for recruiting and retaining skilled professionals. Today, agencies are at a technology crossroads. To learn more about agencies’ pressing HR challenges and how advanced analytics and talent management solutions can help, GovLoop spoke with Laura Glass and Heather Sherlock, Senior Principals, Public Sector at Infor, a software company specializing in digital transformation for enterprise settings. Their experience spans enterprise resource planning with deep experience as HR practitioners across federal, state and local governments. Coupled with manual HR processes, legacy systems make it hard for agencies to be efficient. Glass and Sherlock explained that updating human capital and talent management processes plays a big role in reducing costs, maximizing efficiency, increasing agility, improving security, and allowing an organization to direct more time and resources to mission-driven innovations. Organizations that continue to manage employee hours with outdated methods, like paper timecards, falter in each of these categories. In terms of agility and security, many of today’s modern HR systems are designed to operate in the cloud and meet government’s stringent security standards. In addition to security benefits, updating outdated IT systems and processes can have wide-reaching impacts on employee recruitment and retention. “When they show that they have modern recruiting technology, that’s the first phase
of starting to recruit a talent,” Sherlock said. “You have that front-facing system with your HR. If you can show that that’s a modern system.”
you can engage an employee during their first six to eight months of employment, it is proven they’re more likely to stay,” Sherlock said.
But recruiting top-tier talent requires more than a well-designed exterior. Agencies must also find ways to cultivate prospective employees for future hiring rounds to ensure they are getting the most qualified candidates. Infor’s Talent Science, a cloud-based software suite that helps select, retain and develop employees with behavioral and performance data, can help.
That engagement can come in a number of forms. For example, agencies have placed a higher emphasis on employees interacting with each other, especially from a knowledge sharing and wellness perspective. Glass explained that she’s seen organizations implement walkingstep challenges and other fitness programs to encourage inter-office collaboration. Infor’s Human Capital Management software includes tools that can set agencies in the right direction in regards to engagement.
As an example, if a school district wants to start building a pipeline of candidates, it can allow prospective teachers to submit applications throughout the year. That way, when the next round of hiring comes along, the organization will already have a list of interested parties, complete with detailed information about who would make the best fit. Beyond the applicant database, organizations have begun to review their candidates more holistically, Sherlock said. Job experience is important, but a resume can only tell so much about a person. Using data analytics to link behavior to real business outcomes could reduce turnover and minimize the time and cost of recruiting new employees. Instead of placing all the weight on relevant experience, employers can factor in whether a candidate’s personality would work for a respective role and organization. Unfortunately, hiring the perfect employee doesn’t guarantee that he or she will remain with the organization long-term. To reduce turnover rates, some organizations are taking a more proactive approach to employee engagement. “If
Another area where governments can increase engagement is by refining the concept of performance reviews, Glass said. Traditional models featured a midyear review and an annual review, but there’s been a shift toward more continuous, less formal appraisals. Some agencies now also have the option to bring in automated technology that can proactively recommend training classes to help employees reach their career goals. “That gives employees a better sense of career direction, and a feeling that the organization is investing in them,” Glass said. “That, in turn, helps them to be happier, more satisfied, and more apt to stay at an organization.” The end result is an organization made more efficient, agile and secure through its use of cloud-based, data-driven talent management — a solution that could become the standard in the coming years for governments.
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Buyouts & Retirement Federal agencies have been encouraged to downsize their workforce through various means, including the use of Voluntary Early Retirement Authority and Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments. These offers are less common for state and local governments, which are focused on retaining institutional knowledge when employees retire. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT What’s Happening In an effort to align with workforce reductions that the Trump administration called for, several agencies are offering early retirement packages and buyouts. The president’s budget proposal includes a decrease of 24,000 full-time equivalents in 2018 across 17 of the government’s 24 largest agencies. The remaining seven agencies – most significantly VA, DHS and the Defense Department – would see an increase of about 23,000 FTEs, compared with 2017 levels. “Buyouts in any form are a doubleedged sword,” said Deynes, SHRM’s Vice President of Human Resources and Diversity. “If they’re not assigned and implemented properly, the cost of the entire program can take several years to recoup, due to the resulting cost of recruitment, hiring, training and maturity of the replacement staff — even at significantly lower salary levels for comparable jobs.”
In addition to buyouts, agencies are also grappling with retirements and deciding which vacant position to fill when employees retire. Currently, 41.5 percent of federal employees are eligible to retire in five years, said Tom Ross, President of the nonprofit Volcker Alliance, which focuses on effective execution of public policies. Only 6 percent of full-time federal employees are under the age of 30, compared with 24 percent in other sectors.
The Response Interior, Social Security Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and State are among the growing number of agencies considering and implementing plans for a wave of Voluntary Early Retirement Authority and Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments (VERA/ VSIP) offers. At Interior, the department’s 2018 budget request supports 59,968 FTEs — a reduction of roughly 4,000 staff from 2017. “To accomplish this, the department will rely on a combination of attrition
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and separation incentives,” according to budget documents. “Actual attrition rates and acceptance of separation incentives will determine the need for further action to reduce staffing.” State has already started reshaping its workforce and will reduce staffing levels through attrition and anticipated, targeted buyouts. By the end of fiscal 2018, the department anticipates reducing its workforce by about 8 percent, or 2,000 employees, according to State’s congressional budget justification documents. EPA would see its FTE count slashed by 24 percent under the president’s budget proposal. “The use of VERA/VSIP will increase voluntary attrition and enable more focused support for the agency’s highest-priority work,” according to EPA budget request documents. Already some 400 employees have left the agency since Aug. 31, with most of them taking buyouts, The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2017.
STATE & LOCAL GOVERNMENT What’s Happening Buyouts are not as common at the state and local levels, but there have been discussions about them, and at least one state is using buyouts to reduce the unfunded liability of its employee retirement system. Unfunded liabilities are money the government has promised people but will not be able to pay them. To address this issue in the future, one trend that’s playing out across the country is increased changes to retirement benefits for government employees, said Keith Brainard, Research Director at the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. These changes have always occurred, but they became more frequent around 2010, following the Great Recession. According to the 2017 SLGE survey, changes in retirement benefits are more common for new employees than for current employees. And in terms of workforce separations, 45 percent of
respondents said that retirements are higher now than they were in 2015. But the pace of retirements has slowed compared with 2016, when 54 percent said that retirements were lower than in 2014.
The Response In terms of buyouts at the state and local levels, the Missouri State Employee’s Retirement System established a voluntary pension buyout program that allows certain individuals whom the state no longer employs to cash out their future retirement annuity in exchange for a one-time lump-sum payment. There were talks about offering some form of buyouts to employees in Philadelphia and Alabama, but those discussions didn’t materialize the way they have in Missouri, Brainard said. Pensions are only part of the retirement issue. There’s also the challenge of filling gaps when talented professionals leave.
For example, Cary’s town manager is working to address the growing number of retirement-eligible employees. One approach Stegall uses is promoting younger employees into places of leadership and giving them more responsibilities. For him, gone are the days when it took incremental promotions and years of waiting to be elevated into a management position. Asheville’s CIO said his team weathered multiple retirements in the past two years. There were the normal emotions that come when beloved colleagues leave, but those feelings eventually subsided as other employees got promotions. When employees retire, you lose institutional knowledge, but it also opens the door for new ideas, improvements and a fresh set of eyes on existing services, Feldman said. “If you don’t treat a retirement as an opportunity, you are just not doing your job.”
TIPS FOR COMMUNICATING WITH EMPLOYEES Be strategic. It’s critical that agencies are thinking strategically and critically as they offer buyouts or early retirement. They should identify where skills gaps may exist, what kind of developmental opportunities to offer the existing workforce and whether new hires will be necessary.
See yourself as a resource. In some ways, HR professionals have more power than they realize because they have an opportunity — through the way they communicate with employees — to help ease concerns and navigate change during a difficult time. HR can help employees understand their options, including opportunities and jobs that may exist outside the agency.
Be transparent.
Stay mission-focused.
It’s a two-way street here. Employees should be empowered to ask questions, but ultimately HR should offer a lot of information up front and be as transparent as possible about what’s happening in the workforce, the resources that employees have and how to get answers to their questions.
When doing workforce reshaping, always go back to the mission. What does your mission have to be? What kind of mission creep have you experienced, where your mission expands beyond the intended core? Back away from things that you don’t need to do, and determine what kind of talent you need to achieve your core mission.
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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT
Making the Case for Modern HR Management Tools An interview with Sherry Amos, Director of Market Development, Education and Government at Workday There are billions of dollars’ worth of hardware and software in use across government that is either obsolete or on the verge of lacking vendor support. These older systems are difficult and expensive to maintain and don’t readily meet the needs of today’s modern workforce. Take some of the government’s older HR systems, for example. “Not only have those systems become unwieldy to upgrade and expensive to manage, but HR professionals cannot utilize the data that sits in each of those disparate systems for true datadriven decision-makings,” said Sherry Amos, Director of Market Development, Education and Government at Workday, a leader in strategic workforce planning and analytics.
resources, and it’s difficult to keep up with security and modern technologies.” One of the benefits of moving HR operations to the cloud is that it gives agencies more flexibility to add new capabilities, such as data analytics, to gain a 360-degree view of their workforce. Having access to these types of tools enable HR professionals to perform more strategic projects, including succession planning. Before agencies invested in cloud-based management tools, HR specialists were bogged down with transaction-based tasks, such as payroll, that are now being automated.
In an interview with GovLoop, Amos shared how government is making strides to upgrade its HR systems and improve efficiency and effectiveness with cloud solutions. She also discussed the importance of workforce management programs and tools and how Workday is contributing to those advancements.
Historically, HR professionals spend 80 percent of their time conducting transactions and 20 percent on strategic work. But Workday customers report that SaaS solutions have enabled them to flip that ratio and spend between 50 and 70 percent of their time on strategic work, Amos said. “And that’s really due to a great deal of intuitiveness and an ability to roll out many more self-service capabilities for employees, such as open enrollment for benefits and onboarding.”
As a whole, the HR community has benefited from the government’s gradual adoption of cloud technologies, which gained steam with initiatives like the Cloud First policy. It required agencies to show a preference toward cloud solutions when launching new IT projects.
Agencies are gaining additional efficiencies by offering these capabilities as shared services to their sub-level components, program offices and even outside agencies. This shared approach to technology is reshaping how HR departments organize themselves across an agency.
“HR was actually one of the applications that was an early mover to the cloud,” Amos said. “If the solution is available in the cloud, agencies now realize they can’t continue to manage everything on premise. They don’t have the IT
“Many of them are now able to go from a highly decentralized model of having HR professionals in every part of an agency to centralizing certain functions,” Amos said. Another benefit of shared services is existing employees can become proficient with standard tools and processes and
don’t have to be trained on new systems if they transition to a different part of the organization. For agencies to properly plan for their future needs, they have to invest in modern workforce management programs and tools. The reason being is more employees are becoming eligible for retirement and planning their exit strategies. “They’re now beginning to see those employees retire in very large numbers,” Amos said. “In some government organizations, as much as 25 to 40 percent of their entire staff will be eligible to retire within the next five years.” To plan for these departures, agencies must decide how they will recruit, train and fill vacant positions. How will they preserve institutional knowledge and transfer that knowledge to new employees? And how will they develop future leaders? Amos explained that modern workforce management tools — like those offered by Workday — were designed to solve these types of issues. With Workday, agencies benefit from what Amos calls the Power of One. This means all users are on one technology platform, with one architecture and they use the most current version. The applications they need are offered in one solution that can be accessed on a desktop or mobile device. Workday empowers agencies to take a more active approach to workforce management. As Amos concluded, “You have to understand how many people you have and what kind of people. You have to predict your workforce and proactively source talent to ensure you’re set up for success.”
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Conclusion Managing workforce changes requires proper planning, commitment and communication across government agencies. It requires a partnership between business units and HR departments to ensure employees are informed and encouraged to express their concerns and ask questions about hiring, training opportunities and other issues. Simply put, conversations about workforce reforms should be a two-way street. Part of the angst surrounding these very personal topics comes from inadequate communication – or none at all. That’s why agency leaders must find ways to share and receive comments, thoughts and concerns with employees through various channels. At the same time, employees should be empowered to follow up with their managers and senior leaders as needed. For agencies undergoing major reforms, it’s important to remember that modernization plans are built on target goals, said Shelby, Assistant Secretary for VA’s Office of Human Resources and Administration. “I would advise all of you [agencies] to battle vehemently for the resources you have right now and show down the road that you are going to get to the target.”
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WORKSHEET
SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS FOR AGENCY LEADERSHIP Source: State of Washington Guide to Developing Strategic Workforce Plans
HIRING
DEVELOPMENT
What factors affect your ability to recruit and retain mission-critical knowledge and skills?
What information, resources and technology must employees have to be successful?
What factors are affecting retention of high performers?
How well are managers prepared to coach employees for new opportunities and career growth?
How effective are current retention strategies? What does data from employee surveys and exit interviews show?
How are workforce attitudes (e.g., factors affecting job satisfaction, level of engagement in the workplace, loyalty to employer) expected to change, and what impact do you expect those changes to have on your agency?
How well are individuals identified, assessed and developed for leadership positions?
What forms of training and development are needed to teach mission-critical competencies in the next three to five years?
PERFORMANCE How does your current employee performance management system enable your workforce to be successful?
How effective are your supervisors at dealing with poor performance?
How well do managers provide formal and informal recognition?
How well do leader hold managers accountable for managing people?
About & Acknowledgments ABOUT GOVLOOP GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public- sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 250,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government. For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com. www.govloop.com | @GovLoop
THANK YOU Thank you to CivicPlus, Cornerstone OnDemand, Infor, LinkedIn and Workday for their support of this valuable support for publicsector professionals.
AUTHORS
DESIGNER
Nicole Blake Johnson Senior Editor, Technology
Kaitlyn Baker Lead Graphic Designer
Joe Antoshak Editorial Fellow
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1152 15th St. NW Suite 800 Washington, DC 20005 P: (202) 407-7421 | F: (202) 407-7501 www.govloop.com | @GovLoop
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