About jbmiller

Jeanne Miller is an Instructional Designer and HR Curriculum Manager with the Graduate School USA Curriculum and Learning Solutions. Jeanne is a former federal HR Officer and HR program evaluator and has had extensive experience and education in both federal HR and the instructional design arena, including the development, design, and/or writing of an extensive array of both classroom and online courses for adult learners.

How Do Federal Employees Feel About Their Pay and Jobs?

The Office of Personnel Management has released the government-wide results of the 2018 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey which provide a look at federal employees’ overall satisfaction with their jobs, pay, and agency management.

Pay

The results indicate that overall, federal employees are more satisfied with their pay when compared to past years. In response to the question, “Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your pay?” the response rate was 63% positive. Last year, it was 61% positive and was only 56% positive in 2014.

Highest and Lowest Ratings

Other high marks were given to questions regarding overall job satisfaction. For instance, federal employees said “When needed I am willing to put in the extra effort to get a job done” (96%), “I am constantly looking for ways to do my job better” (91%), and “The work I do is important” (90%).

Lower ratings were given around areas regarding management related issues such as dealing with poor performers and merit based promotions. [For the rest of this article, click here.]

In your experience, are the results of the survey typical of your agency? Did anything surprise you?

 

From Inefficient to Integrated: Automating HR Process Improves Workforce Management

Federal government leaders and human resources staff are responsible for managing an enormous number of employees. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, employs about 320,000 people—more than the population of Pittsburgh. And even the smallest Cabinet-level agencies have thousands of workers.

To do a good job of overseeing talent in organizations with that many employees, agencies must have technology and processes that help HR staff work efficiently, and leaders must have access to comprehensive, timely data to guide their workforce decisions. Otherwise, agencies are not capitalizing on their greatest asset and operate at a disadvantage.

“People are the agency,” said Lacey Dingman, chief human capital officer at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “If you don’t manage in a good way, you will feel the impact. Productivity will go down.”

Agencies recognize they need to function in a 21st century fashion, but many still work with outdated technology, manual HR processes and paper records for everything from hiring and timekeeping to performance management and succession planning. They struggle to manage their workforces in an efficient, comprehensive way—which involves tracking, developing and guiding employees from recruitment to retirement.

While automation seems like a given in today’s world, many federal HR processes are still manual. No matter how good agencies are at managing their talent to achieve their missions, they are inevitably hampered if their paper trail is actual paper. Even in agencies that have automated, paperless processes, most use numerous, disparate IT systems that do not communicate with one other and house data in many different places. One Cabinet-level department, for example, maintains more than 100 IT systems to manage its HR-related activities—not the most streamlined or efficient way to run an agency.

The Partnership for Public Service and Cornerstone OnDemand set out to explore whether agencies are managing talent holistically and what systems they use … [For the rest of the report, click here.]

Do you agree with the recommendations outlined with this report? In your opinion, which recommendations would be most important for your agency to implement?

Post and Pursue: Improving Federal Hiring Using Data and Targeted Recruitment

In this time of tight budgets and the Trump administration’s call for workforce reductions, it is more critical than ever for agencies to fill vacancies with the most highly skilled and qualified individuals available. However, the cumbersome federal hiring process can be a deterrent for agencies attempting to bring top talent into public service.

In an annual federal survey, a large number of employees responded that government is falling short when it comes to recruiting the best people. Only 41 percent of federal employees said their agencies and work units were recruiting individuals with the right skills, according to the 2016 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings compiled by the Partnership for Public Service.

The Partnership and LinkedIn set out to understand how agencies can overcome the hiring barriers through the use of data analysis and targeting–also known as data-driven recruitment—to recruit talent more effectively.

Through interviews and workshops with agency human resources staff and human capital managers, we identified three key elements for improving hiring: using data to find talent; encouraging collaboration between hiring managers and human resources staff; and relying on special hiring authorities. [For the rest of this report, click here.]

What of the data provided by this report most surprised you? How would you use the data in this report (or similar data for your organization) to improve hiring at your agency?

HR–The $5 Billion Question

A recent Government Accountability Office report on Department of Defense (DOD) efforts to reduce overhead costs highlights the difficulty in achieving savings in administrative services. DOD was tasked by Congress to reduce overhead costs by $10 billion per year.

Human Resources Costs

HR is one of those overhead services that can consume a surprising amount of money. In DOD or any agency, the cost of operating HR offices is a significant line item.

How significant? Let’s take a look at only those jobs that are in the two primary HR job series (GS-201 for HR Specialists and GS-203 for HR Clerks and Assistants).

At the end of March (the most recent available data) the federal government had 29,830 GS-201s, with an average salary of $90,648. There were 10,168 GS-203s, with an average salary of $46,135. Without fringe benefits, the GS-201s cost $2.7 billion per year and GS-203s cost $469 million. Add 30 percent for fringe benefits (health and life insurance, retirement, etc.) and those costs go up to $3.5 billion and $610 million (a total of $4.1 billion).

We know that not every person in HR is a GS-201 or GS-203, so the actual cost for HR office labor is actually more than $4.1 billion. A reasonable estimate of non-HR series labor costs in HR is about 10 percent, so if we add another $400 million to cover those folks, we have total HR labor costs of about $4.5 billion per year.

These numbers do not include other costs of running HR, such as technology, contracts, office space, and other overhead costs. Most people use 80 percent as the amount of a typical budget that is direct labor, and 20 percent for those other costs. If we add that into our HR cost calculation, … [For the rest of this article, click here.]

Do you agree with the points made in this article? Why or why not? Do you agree with its conclusion?

The Urgency of Strengthening and Redefining HR

“Over time, the alignment between the government’s mission, strategy, and tactics on one hand, and the capacity of its workforce on the other, has fallen further out of sync. The result has been an accumulating series of program failures that have grown into a genuine national crisis.”

To call it a national crisis is not hyperbole. Human capital management leads the 2017 list of GAO’s high-risk areas and workforce management is integral to each of the areas on the list. GAO’s focus was limited to the skills gap. In its report, GAO concluded, “OPM and agencies have not yet demonstrated sustainable progress in closing skills gaps.” It’s been on the high-risk list for 16 years.

The skills gap needs to be seen as the tip of the iceberg. Skills alone cannot produce improved performance. The Office of Personnel Management describes the problem … [For the rest of this article, click here.]

Many Don’t See Women As Leaders At Work

Despite progress toward greater gender equality, on average, men are still more likely than women to emerge as leaders, according to a new study.

Researchers aggregated 59 years of research, encompassing more than 19,000 participants and 136 studies from lab, business, and classroom settings. They discovered that while the gender gap has narrowed in recent decades, it still persists. Today, for example, women hold just 26 percent of executive-level positions in S&P 500 companies.

“As a society, we’ve made progress toward gender equality, but clearly we’re not quite there,” says Katie Badura, a doctoral student at the University at Buffalo School of Management. “Our results are consistent with the struggle many organizations face today to increase diversity in their leadership teams.”

The researchers primarily attribute the gender gap to … [For the rest of the article, click here.]

Do you agree with the conclusions of this article? What other recommendations might you have to help the gender gap discussed here?

When Hiring a Particular Candidate Might Constitute a Prohibited Personnel Practice

Perhaps over the past several months, hiring officials have contemplated how they would advertise a vacancy on USAJOBS and may even have a particular candidate in mind whom they believe would be “perfect for the job.”

This article discusses an area of law not widely known to federal managers—specifically, the prohibited personnel practice that can result from defining the scope or manner of competition or requirements for a particular position in a way that favors certain candidates, or disfavors others.

Picture this scenario: an agency hired an employee for a four (4)-year term position to fill a critical need for a linguist in a remote area. That employee was not veteran’s preference-eligible, but at the time he competed for the term position was the best qualified linguist among all non-preference eligible applicants and, therefore, got the job.

The agency’s linguist requirement continued longer than expected, so the agency received… [For the rest of the article, click here.]

Before reading the article, would you have considered the linguist scenario to have constituted a prohibited personnel practice? Did your opinion change after reading the article?

Advice for Managers About Weingarten Meetings

These articles are directed to Federal managers and supervisors who are considering interviewing (questioning) an employee concerning some allegedly bad or questionable behavior. I have been doing a bunch of supervisory training lately and hearing lots about union representatives who appear to be seeking a profit opportunity based on managers’ lack of training and/or experience in conducting disciplinary fact-gathering meetings.

Part One, Generally Let the Pros Handle ‘Em or Try An Alternate Method looks at the ins and outs of running a Weingarten or Investigative meeting. Included in the article is a planning checklist for a supervisor or manager anticipating such a meeting..

Part Two, Some Options to Consider looks at why supervisors don’t have to hold a meeting and why it might be in your interest to try another way of getting information from an employee alleged to have committed misconduct.

What can you take away from these articles that will help you better do your job as an HR practitioner? What information can you share with supervisors as part of your advisory responsibilities?

Winning at Weingarten

Sixty years ago while living in my native state of Texas, my brother was a bag boy at our neighborhood grocery store – Weingarten’s. Long after my dad was transferred to New York, an employee of J. Weingarten, Inc. was grilled by a company investigator for allegedly shortchanging her employer. She repeatedly asked to have a union representative present; however, those requests were denied.

The evidence against her was unconvincing, however, she protested she had only taken her free lunches, a benefit allowed at many Weingarten stores but not hers. She was fired… and the rest is history.

The “Weingarten Right” stems from the Supreme Court’s decision in her case, which was issued in 1975 – 3 years after that fateful interview and request for representation. By then, the National Labor Relations Board had found in the union’s favor, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed the Board, and the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling in a split decision. Labor law was forever changed.

The government isn’t a business

At the time, NLRB v. J. Weingarten, Inc. did not apply to Uncle Sam’s employees and unions; however, the passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, 5 U.S. Code § 7114(a)(2)(B) created the same right for unions in the Federal government… [For the rest of the article, click here.]

Were you aware of all the aspects of Weingarten rights discussed in the article? What recommendations in the article do you think would be helpful for your agency in general and for you as an HR practitioner in specific? 

Private-Sector NLRB Weingarten Ruling Could Affect Federal Sector Too

A bargaining unit employee’s statements to Agency representatives concerning his or her attempts to obtain union representation will likely be sufficient to trigger Weingarten even if the employee does not make an explicit request for representation in the underlying investigatory interview. A recent National Labor Relations Board (“Board”) decision issued last month seems to interpret Weingarten more liberally than ever before.

While federal agencies have held the traditional view that the right to union representation at a disciplinary interview arises “only in situations where the employee requests representation,” NLRB v. J. Weingarten, Inc., 430 U.S. 251, 256-57 (1975), a June 15, 2018 decision by the Board appears to loosen the standard for determining when Weingarten rights are triggered.

In Circus Circus Casinos, Inc. d/b/a Circus Circus Las Vegas and Michael Schramm, 2018 NLRB LEXIS 215, Case 28-CA-120975 (Jun. 15, 2018), the Board adopted the Administrative Law Judge’s finding that the employer violated a bargaining unit employee’s Weingarten rights by denying a union representative at a due process meeting concerning the employee’s suspension from work. [For the rest of the article, click here.]

How does your agency identify in what situations a Weingarten right may be triggered? Have you seen a situation in which an employee should have been provided with union representation but wasn’t? What happened in that situation?