Innovations in Human Resource Management

Getting the Public's Work Done in the 21st Century

Hannah S. Sistare,Myra Howze Shiplett,Terry F. Buss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317467861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Human resource management is experiencing profound change, new challenges, exciting accomplishments, and much uncertainity. The public service has moved away from the old days of "personnel management" concerned mostly with processing "personal action" paperwork, to a system where public employees are managed as human capital to get the work of the government done more effectively and efficiently. This volume brings together the latest thinking on human resource management in the public service, presented by distinguished thought leaders in the field. While it focuses primarily on federal government policies and practices, the principles, conclusions, and recommendations translate readily to state and local government, and to the private sector as well.

1

An Overview

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MYRA HOWZE SHIPLETT

Transformation is about creating the future, not perfecting the past.

—David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, November 2007

Three streams of activity merged in this first decade of the twenty-first century that support vibrant, effective, and efficient human resources policies and programs, promoting a culture of performance in public organizations.

When Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, a revolution began in the way citizens and public employees began to think about government functions, products, and services to citizens.¹ The sense of Congress in passing GPRA was that federal managers were unable to improve program efficiency and effectiveness, because program goals were not articulated and performance information was inadequate. Because federal managers were inhibited from performing at their best, Congress was handicapped in making spending decisions and performing program oversight.

The law directed that every federal agency develop a mission statement and a strategic plan with goals and outcomes and to “express such goals in an objective, quantifiable, and measurable form … for the major programs and operations of the agency.” Under the direction of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), each agency was also to develop a performance plan articulating how the agency planned to meet its strategic goals and outcomes, to develop metrics to assess the degree to which outcomes were achieved, and to report annually to Congress on what the agency had achieved or failed to achieve. The mission statements were prepared and the first strategic plans were prepared for fiscal year 1999.

This focus on program effectiveness and efficiency enabled departments and agencies to question program priorities in a much more structured and analytical way, which ultimately led these organizations to also question the resource allocations—money, people, and materiel—associated with program priorities.

The roots of the human resources revolution emerged some fifteen years earlier when public organizations—and particularly federal departments and agencies—realized that the rigid civil service structures established with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which ushered in a merit-based civil service for the United States, were no longer adequate to assure that the federal civil service could attract and retain a well-qualified workforce. In response to those needs, a variety of human resources reform legislation was passed beginning with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. However, these reforms were not as successful as supporters had hoped because they were designed and implemented somewhat in isolation, without any particular regard for the substantive programs they were to support in departments and agencies. Only after the GPRA mandated mission statements supported by strategic plans with measurable objectives and outcomes was there a policy foundation with an analytical framework able to ask the needed questions about resource allocation.

At the same time that the GPRA was passed, the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) established its Center for Human Resources Management (HRM Center). To support research on human resources issues, the HRM Center established a consortium of public organizations that contributed funds to enable research on a wide variety of human resources issues, programs, and problems. At its height in the early 2000s, the consortium had more than sixty federal, state, local, and international organizations as members. The consortium’s research touched every facet of strategic and operational program issues in human resources. It provided members—particularly the federal agency members—with a forum for exploring solutions to complex human resources problems and issues. Universities and professional organizations also began to focus their research attention on human resources issues.

As a result of all of these activities, there is now a substantial body of knowledge about how employees act, react, and interact within public organizations and about the types of human resource policies, programs, and practices needed to enable public organizations to attract and retain a well-qualified workforce (see w­w­w­.­n­a­p­a­w­a­s­h­.­o­r­g­/­p­c­_­h­u­m­a­n­_­r­e­s­o­u­r­c­e­s­/­i­n­d­e­x­2­.­h­t­m­l).

The chapters of this book share some of the very best of those efforts as well as providing insight and analysis about perplexing issues that remain to be solved.

In his foreword, Paul Volcker—former chairperson of the National Commission on the Public Service and of the Federal Reserve Board, and NAPA fellow, lays out the need for change and the hope that it will occur, opining that progress has been achieved through more innovative and effective federal human capital policies.

I have laid out, above, a concise description of the evolving field of human resources and the linkages that must exist between and among the range of human resources policies, programs, and procedures as well as the linkages that must exit between human resources programs and the organization’s substantive policies and programs. The chapters below capture the major issues and trends in human capital management.

J. Christopher Mihm, a NAPA Fellow and Director of Strategic Issues for the Government Accountability Office (GAO), describes in Chapter 2 the challenges that the future holds, arguing that human capital management must be central to any anticipated transformation strategy for government. His chapter serves to organize the topics for the chapters that follow.

Chapters 3 through 6 look at the multisector workforce that has dramatically altered the traditional model in which civil servants exclusively delivered public services. Government now produces its products and services through multiple sources—contracts, grants, volunteer services, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This raises issues of accountability, procurement, or acquisition strategy and practice, human capital management, governance, and social equity.² How can government organizations plan for and manage this more disparate workforce with its different cultures, motivations, and performance incentives? Alethea Long-Green, in Chapter 3, discusses the intricacies of managing the multisector workforce in a series of case studies.

Laurie May reviews the realities of multisector workforce planning and management challenges in Chapter 4, reporting on a 2006–2007 study of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to determine how an agency faced with a radically changing mission could and should manage its multisector workforce. May details how NASA handled the issues of accountability, acquisition, human resources management, social equity, and the legal and governance issues that resulted from the president’s directive to terminate the space shuttle program and refocus NASA’s work and workforce on returning to the moon and on human exploration of Mars and beyond. Holton et al. in Chapter 8, describe in detail the strategic human capital management effort at NASA.

In Chapter 5, NAPA Fellow Bruce McDowell writes about another challenge that emerges from contracting for government goods and services: most efficient organizations (MEOs). MEOs are new structures created within the U.S. government in which federal employees compete against the private sector to keep their commercial-type jobs. For the human resources community, the primary significance of competitive sourcing through MEOs is that the federal government has a new type of organization and a new type of employee. McDowell points out that a lot of work was completed on how to create an MEO, but very little thought was given to how they would work in practice.

The uncertainly of today’s world requires government agencies that deal with disasters to be particularly nimble in their ability to respond efficiently and effectively. In Chapter 6, Terry Buss and Joseph Thompson describe the experience of the Small Business Administration (SBA) in dealing with damaged homes and businesses after Hurricane Katrina. The SBA’s dilemma is how to maintain a workforce surge capacity to meet victim needs in rare megadisasters without spending excessive amounts of taxpayer dollars while waiting for something bad to happen. While the military has always had its surge capacity through the National Guard, only in more recent times have civilian agencies needed this capability. Given the uncertainties of the twenty-first-century domestic and international political landscapes, a variety of federal, state, and local governments are grappling with this issue. At the federal level, the FBI and the Department of State are now struggling with these issues, as is SBA. Buss and Thompson lay out some possible nontraditional solutions to this workforce problem.

In chapters 7 through 10, contributors lay out major transformation initiatives in two agencies, the GAO and NASA. Then two chapters look at organizational transformation at the individual level through succession planning and leadership development, and using networks of young government leaders. In Chapter 7, David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States and NAPA Fellow, recounts the effort he led to transform the GAO from an organization designed to audit federal agency activities to one that would assess federal agency performance. Walker shows how the GAO transformation relied heavily on innovative human capital management practices and policy that have now become models in the federal system.

In Chapter 8, Elwood F. Holton, Sean C. O’Keefe (former NASA Administrator, NAPA Fellow), Vicki A. Novak (former NASA Chief Human Capital Officer, NAPA Fellow), and David M. Walker discuss NASA’s evolutionary development of a strategic human capital program. One salient observation is: When an organization invests in human capital, three outcomes occur that cannot be owned by the organization, making it different from physical and fiscal capital. For individuals, investment results in increased knowledge, skills, and abilities, leading to individual development and growth. For the organization, investment results in better performance and productivity. And for society, more qualified individuals and highly productive organizations result in community growth and development.

Ruth Zaplin and Sydney Smith-Heimbrock in Chapter 9 discuss succession planning and the importance of a method for identifying, selecting, and developing leaders who understand the forces of transition and transformation.³

Kitty Wooley raises two common problems for which uncommon answers have emerged in Chapter 10. The problems are: inadequate or ill-fitting support for inexperienced new hires, leading to feelings of isolation, and a disconnect between leadership training and succession planning, fueling employee disappointment and disengagement. Either outcome makes it difficult for an agency to realize the intended return on (its human capital) investment. On that basis alone, the emerging solutions that follow are worthy of study. This chapter reports on new networks that have been generated by employees of several federal agencies with the potential to turn these problems into solutions.

Over the past decade, policymakers and managers have implemented numerous innovative human capital solutions to improve effectiveness and efficiency, as presented in chapters 11 through 16. James R. Thompson and Rob Seidner examine the issues of paybanding and pay for performance in Chapter 11. They note that “the prevalence of paybanding in federal agencies results from flaws in the General Schedule (GS), the government’s predominant compensation and classification system. The authors discuss various paybanding efforts and their results over the last almost thirty years. Their discussion concludes with a summary of the lessons learned from these experiences. Among the most important lessons learned is that with paybanding, managers are more accountable for results.

Tim Rutledge writes on the power and importance of employee retention and engagement in Chapter 12. He describes the changes in demographics and diminution of labor market growth. His thesis is that “employee loyalty has been replaced by employee engagement.” Creating and maintaining employee engagement requires a very different approach to work assignments, supervision, and management of the workforce. It also requires that both career and political executives have the courage to address performance issues by rewarding good performance and either correcting poor performance or finding ways to have the poor performer leave the organization. The shrinking labor market does not allow organizations to waste...