Agencies get new personnel flexibilities
Under Workforce Flexibility Act, some reforms go into effect immediately; others won’t take effect for several months.
President Bush signed the 2004 Federal Workforce Flexibility Act into law Saturday, immediately activating a number of personnel and hiring reforms.
The bill, introduced two years ago by Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, finally won approval from Congress in early October. Voinovich has said the legislation will "provide new tools" to improve hiring and retention in the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management distributed a memo to federal agencies on Monday alerting them to the policy changes.
The first reforms to take effect deal with annual leave, critical pay authority and training. Federal agencies are now able to immediately award members of the Senior Executive Service and senior level scientific or professional employees with one day of leave for each biweekly pay period. The same benefits also will be available to senior employees in similar pay systems, and OPM announced plans to release guidelines for those employees, too.
A separate aspect of the recently signed legislation shifts responsibility for the federal government's critical pay authority from the Office of Management and Budget to OPM. Under this authority, an agency chief can now ask OPM to adjust the basic pay rate for a critical position. Such positions "must require a very high level of expertise in a scientific, technical, professional or administrative field and be crucial to the accomplishment of an agency's mission," according to the OPM memo.
Also effective immediately, federal agencies are required to "regularly evaluate and modify training programs" to push a more strategic approach. In addition, agencies must launch programs to develop future managers.
Another section of the law, which has generated a substantial amount of interest from federal employees, is the provision for time off for business travel. If federal workers are required to travel for work-outside of their regularly scheduled time-they will be granted compensatory time off. That provision is slated to take effect before Jan. 28, 2005.
Two measures that are designed to boost recruitment are not scheduled to take effect until well into 2005. One provision, which recognizes private work experience when calculating vacation time for newly hired senior employees, is scheduled to take effect no later than April 28. The second, which allows enhanced bonuses for recruitment and retention, is set to take effect May 1.