SSA turns human capital plan into action

The Social Security Administration says a General Accounting Office study aimed at helping federal agencies align human capital needs with performance goals has helped officials at the agency develop better workforce plans.

Released in 1999 as a discussion draft, the study, "Human Capital: A Self-Assessment Checklist for Agency Leaders"(OCG-00-14G), was revised and released in the form of a set of guidelines in September after GAO officials visited agencies and gauged the effect of their previous recommendations.

"We spent a year giving it a shot out there in the real world and then we put it out this year as GAO guidance," a GAO official said about the report. "What the guide does do is it affirms that we were on the right track, because many agencies who have seen and worked with the guide have found it useful and have told us that they plan to make use of it as they work to align their human capital strategies with their strategic and program planning."

At SSA, leadership development and training programs were fine-tuned because of recommendations from the GAO's report.

Now the agency uses interactive video training to teach employees at their work sites, saving on travel costs. The new training method also improves opportunities for women to advance at the agency, said Paul D. Barnes, SSA's top human resources official. Many women had been reluctant to travel for training and, as a result, often didn't apply for promotions. The agency also increased the frequency of its leadership development programs, allowing more employees to take advantage of them.

Barnes said the GAO checklist has helped SSA develop strategies for dealing with the anticipated retirement of as many as 35,000 of the agency's 65,000 employees in the next few years.

"What the assessments do for agencies is give people a road map that they can follow, and for us it served to validate some of the things that we had been doing for some time and sort of convinced us that we were in fact headed in the right direction with human capital investments," said Barnes.