Smart Workforce Planning

Office of Personnel Management officials Richard Whitford and Mary Ellen Beach are evangelists for a five-step workforce planning model. The two say the model takes the surprise out of human resources management, helping agencies predict trends that will affect them and dispel anecdotal workforce myths that raw numbers prove false. But Whitford warns that workforce planning is not easy, and that Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels' September deadline for restructuring plans based on workforce analyses will be tough for some to meet. "Between now and September, some agencies are going to be doing a lot of running," Whitford says.

Here are the five steps they'll be jogging through:

1. Set a strategic direction.
Ideally, agency officials already know what they want to accomplish over the next five years thanks to strategic planning required by the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act. "The value of workforce planning is assuring you have the resources needed for carrying out your strategic plan," says Myra Shiplett, director of the National Academy of Public Administration's Center for Human Resources Management. "You need to make sure you know how to match your people issues with your programmatic issues." The Social Security Administration, for example, anticipates a swelling workload because the nation's population is aging. The agency is going to automate as much work as possible and also is devoting more time to training now so workers are better able to handle the bigger workload.

2. Identify your skills supply, demand and discrepancies.
Figure out what skills employees must have in order to achieve the mission-the demand side of workforce planning. Then inventory the skills available now and in the future-the supply side. Finally, identify the gaps between the two and where you can find people to fill those gaps. Where can you find the information you need? OPM maintains statistics on the federal workforce at www.fedscope.opm.gov. The Education Department keeps track of who's learning what at the nation's colleges and universities at nces.ed.gov. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov) and the Census Bureau (www.census.gov) have data on the workforce at large. "The federal government is absolutely the mother lode, gold mine of statistics," Whitford says.

3. Develop an action plan.
NAPA's Shiplett recommends that executives make a three- to five-year workforce plan. In rapidly changing agencies, the plan should be reviewed and updated annually as part of the budget process. Action plans can be relatively simple in small work units. When Malcolm Woodward took over as chief of operations for the personnel shop at the Justice Department's Office of Justice Programs, the place was a mess. Managers in the 850-person office were waiting for the personnel department to complete a backlog of about 30 staffing actions. Staffing actions include classifying positions, placing recruitment advertisements and processing selected candidates. Personnel employees felt limited because each was in charge of only one part of the staffing process. Woodward decided to train workers so any one of them could take a manager's personnel request from start to finish. "Classification as a distinct profession is going away," Woodward says. "So we put the roles together and did a gap analysis with each specialist." Woodward provided training in weak areas. The group eliminated its backlog and became so efficient that the personnel shop cut two of eight staffing specialist positions.

4. Implement the action plan.
Retraining, outsourcing and recruitment are three main ways to implement workforce plans. With the coming federal retirement bulge, agencies are likely to be doing some heavy recruiting. IRS workforce planner Alex Manganaris used computer models to target recruiting. For example, the agency's unit for small businesses might have 10 positions opening up in the coming year, while the unit for large companies might have five positions opening. Manganaris' model would find that workers from the small business unit would be the most likely candidates to fill the large business unit's openings, so the small business unit would actually need to plan to recruit 15 people, rather than 10.

5. Evaluate and revise.
Workforce planners also need to be workforce evaluators. OPM's Beach says agencies need to ask themselves, "What was the return on our investment?" The return on investment often is keeping up with the workload. The workforce forecasting tool used by the Social Security Administration helped the agency keep its workforce complete. Last year, for example, the agency lost 3,400 employees to attrition and retirement but hired 3,500 people, says SSA human resources chief Paul Barnes.