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Agencies recognize they need to function in a 21st century fashion, but many still work with outdated technology, manual HR processes and paper records for everything from hiring and timekeeping to performance management and succession planning.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?