September 30, 2014
The Board's success in achieving its mission depends on having the right number of people with the necessary technical, managerial, and leadership skills. Accordingly, human capital is one of the key themes in the Board's Strategic Framework 2012–15. As the Board's framework notes, maximizing the value of the Board's human capital will depend on enhancing processes for effective recruitment, development, and retention of qualified staff. A key first step in ensuring that the Board has a workforce that can effectively carry out the Board's mission both now and in the future is identifying the critical technical, managerial, and leadership skills through workforce and succession planning. The Board faces challenges in maintaining the necessary skill sets due to competition for highly qualified staff and the difficulties associated with replacing employees who have the specialized knowledge and skill needed to fulfill the Board's mission. In addition, the Board will face challenges as it implements a new performance management process and continues its efforts to recruit and retain a more diverse workforce.
The Board will need to determine the skill sets and number of staff members needed to enable each division to efficiently and effectively accomplish its goals. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) congressional testimony highlighted the need for federal agencies to identify and address current and emerging critical skills gaps to reduce the risk of staffing shortfalls that could jeopardize agencies' efforts to accomplish their missions. In its 2003 report Human Capital: Key Principles for Effective Strategic Workforce Planning, GAO highlights effective principles for workforce planning that include determining the critical skills and competencies needed to achieve an agency's mission, along with strategies to address skill and competency gaps.
An important consideration in workforce planning is the need to develop a succession plan to ensure continuity of knowledge and leadership in key positions. The Board has noted the operational risks associated with staff retirement and turnover and the difficulties associated with replacing employees with specialized knowledge and skill sets. Failure to plan for and anticipate turnover and departures could have a negative effect on the Board's ability to achieve its goals and fulfill its mission. In addition, the Board has experienced turnover in the leadership of various divisions, highlighting the need for clear succession plans. In a 2005 report on succession planning, GAO encourages federal agencies to "go beyond a succession planning approach that focuses on replacing individuals and engage in broad, integrated succession planning and management efforts that focus on strengthening current and future organizational capacity." To ensure that the Board successfully achieves its mission, each division will need to identify its current and emerging skill needs, develop and implement a plan to address any identified skill gaps, and ensure that leadership development is a component of its succession planning.
In its strategic framework, the Board acknowledged the need to establish a Boardwide succession planning process, which will require considerable support across all divisions. The 2012–2015 Human Resources Strategic Plan also identifies leadership development as a key focus area. In support of these objectives, the Board formed a Leading and Managing People workgroup, composed of senior managers and officers across divisions. The purpose of this workgroup is to develop leadership capacity, including but not limited to introducing leadership coaching, creating case studies to define successful and unsuccessful leadership skills, and developing a list of core competencies expected of leaders. The Board has also successfully implemented a new manager development program, which it is expanding to include senior Board officials, and has begun using a succession planning tool.
In early 2013, the Board elected to change how employees approach and use individual performance feedback. The Board is currently developing and implementing a new performance management program intended to align staff members to the work of the Board, provide greater accountability, and support employee development. The new program seeks to be a more forward-looking, development-centric process in which staff members and managers work together for the greater effectiveness of the Board. The new performance management program is a significant change for the Board. The Board will need to ensure that the new process is effective, fair, and not overly burdensome, while simultaneously maintaining distinctions between high and low performers. Ensuring a successful paradigm shift from a rating-centric process to a development-centric process for assessing employee performance, as well as ensuring that a consistent approach is followed across the Board, will be a challenge for the Board.
The Board introduced the new performance management process as a pilot in six divisions for performance year 2013–2014. Full implementation in all divisions is planned for performance year 2014–2015. The Board contracted for the necessary expertise to assist with the program's implementation, which includes information sessions, tools and guides, training, and other support.
The Board's policy is to provide equal opportunity in employment for all persons. In support of this commitment, the Board has established strategic objectives to attract, hire, develop, promote, and retain a highly diverse workforce. A diverse workforce is one that not only includes employees with a wide variety of attributes but also is rich in diversity of thought and perspective. According to the Office of Personnel Management's Government-Wide Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan, harnessing the innovation that can come from a diverse workforce will help agencies to realize full performance potential and to cultivate a high-performing organization. Although the Board has undertaken a number of activities to increase diversity, it noted continuing challenges in hiring minorities in its April 2014 Report to the Congress on the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. In April 2013, GAO reported that federal agency officials said the main challenge to improving diversity was identifying candidates, noting that minorities and women are often underrepresented in both internal and external candidate pools.
To successfully achieve its diversity goals and objectives, the Office of Human Resources plans to partner with divisions to design, develop, and implement an integrated Boardwide talent management strategy. This strategy will facilitate the management of a diverse workforce throughout all phases of the employee life cycle, which includes recruiting, engaging, retaining, and developing employees. Building on each phase of the life cycle will enable the Board to create an integrated approach to managing talent. An enterprise-wide talent management strategy that identifies the basic competencies every employee should possess will allow the Board to assess performance and to develop and retain talent. In addition, the Board continues to address challenges to improving diversity by participating in educational forums and offering mentoring programs and summer internships.
