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Sydney Heimbrock: Good afternoon everybody, and welcome to today's OPM Webcast on leading
change management. I hope I'm not too loud. I feel like I'm [laughs] really loud. I'm
shouting, the good news about change management. My name is Sydney Heimbrock, I am Deputy Associate
Director, for strategic workforce planning with OPM's employee services division.
As you know, we provide guidance to the federal HR and leadership and management communities
on everything to do with managing our most precious resource, which is our people. And
we're very pleased to bring you this in a series of workforce restructuring events,
around all of the different changes that are confronting the federal government and in
particular HR and leadership, literally as we speak.
We organized this session in recognition that we are all facing fast-moving and deep changes
across the federal environment. Just to give you one example, you've probably seen that
retirement rates have consistently exceeded projections. With those departures, we face
the conundrum of how to continue engaging employees who must continue the good work
of governance, even in the face of hiring freezes and pay freezes and all of the other
environmental challenges that we're facing.
We have to be mindful of their experiences, as well as how we continue to engage them
during the time of transition. Clearly it is no longer enough to say that we must do
more with less. I think that's sort of an old catch phrase that no longer applies. Now
we face the conundrum of what it is that in fact we must do, how we will do it, and whom
we will need to get it done. And that's a very different and more fundamental question
that I think this government is now facing.
Clearly that is a question that, in and of itself, drives deep change, and the answers
will drive deep change. What we're grappling with today is, are we going to manage that
change and lead that change in a way that revitalizes our environment, that reengages
our workforce, and that shifts the tone for our organizations from feeling somewhat besieged
and beleaguered to feeling optimistic and being willing to get out there and start innovating,
and start driving results for the American people.
As we look at change management across the Federal environment, we need to be prepared
to do some really tough new thinking. We need to be willing to engage with each other transparently
and ask tough questions about what our existing culture is, what culture we want to identify
for our future, how to define that in collaboration with our talented employees, and how to reengage
and reinvigorate our workforce toward an optimistic future.
This event is designed to help you think about some strategies that we're privileged to hear
directly from the people who have driven them in their own organizations, Department of
Treasury and the intelligence community, and give you some ideas and tools. Most importantly,
what we hope happens here is the start of a set of provocative questions that we can
continue to explore together to really drive deep and lasting change for the better in
our work environments across government.
OPM is here to partner with you in this interesting new challenge. We're very excited to have
you here, especially the 400 plus people who are watching on the webcast, and of course
our audience here in person. Please engage with us, because that's what this is about.
We want to have these kinds of vigorous conversations so that we can work together toward a shared
vision of the future, as we drive positive change in the Federal workforce.
I hope you enjoy the program. I'm going to now turn it over to Renee Singleton, who is
a group manager for talent management innovations in strategic workforce planning. She will
introduce our speakers and also provide a few housekeeping items for our participants
today. Thank you again.
Renee Singleton: Thanks, Sydney. Before I go into providing background on the speakers,
what I am going to do is cover our housekeeping rules for those onsite for this event. Please
remember food or drinks are not allowed in the auditorium. There are restrooms on this
level, so if you were to exit the auditorium, turn right, and continue straight, then you
would see the restrooms on your left-hand side.
If there is an emergency, and we have to take shelter and place, we should remain in our
seats unless told to relocate. A broadcast announcement will announce the shelter in
place. We have to evacuate the building if that is the scenario. What we would do is
we would walk out, we would not run, to the nearest exit which is on the right hand side
of this room. We would exit out the auditorium, and we would meet across at General St. Martin
Park, and use our attendee list as part of today's check-in process to account for everyone.
So without further adieu, it is with high pleasure that I'm very excited about the topic
we have today and, not only that, but the distinguished presenters that we have before
us.
Our first speaker is Ms. Anita Blair. Ms. Blair is the deputy assistant secretary of
a treasury for human resources and a chief human capital officer. She is responsible
for department-wide policy and oversight in all areas of human capital management including
human resources, labor and employee relations, diversity management, and equal employment
opportunity among other things.
Before joining the treasury department in February 2011, Anita was Chief Strategist
for the National Security Professional Development Integration Office. From 2001-2009, she served
in the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs.
First as the Deputy Secretary for Military Personnel Policy, and later as the Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Total Force Transformation responsible for developing and implementing
the department's human capital strategy.
In 2008, she became the acting Assistant Secretary, overseeing the management of a workforce comprising
over 800,000 active and reserved sailors, marines, and civilian government employees.
In prior public service, Ms. Blair co-chaired the human capital working group of a project
on national security reform producing recommendations and proposed legislation for its 2009 report
to Congress titled "Turning Ideas Into Action".
Ms. Blair is going to give us her valuable insights on change management and what it
takes to promote cultural change within an organization. Ms. Blair's presentation is
titled "Leading Change Management: Models for Making Change", so you want to take good
notes for this one.
Anita, please come on up. Thank you.
Anita Blair: Great. Thank you, Renee. I'm very happy to be here. I appreciate your efforts
and those of the people in OPM to put this program together. Sydney, I have to say, I
could not ask for a better introduction and foundation for what we are talking about today.
You have really hit the target with your comments about the environment we are in and the need
for us to be able to conceive of ways that we can do the right thing and do everything
better.
Change is one of my favorite topics. There are different things that people ask me to
talk about, but when they want me to talk about change, it is very exciting to me. Change
is a fascinating idea. For thousands of years, people have been talking about change.
Usually they put into my bio that I majored in classical Greek in college, so I was always
trying to use a classical allusion. I have a quote from Herodotus, a little story about
the nature of change, and an ancient philosopher once said, "A person who lives 70 years lives
for over 25,000 days, and not one single one of those days is exactly like any other."
That is change for you when you consider that, even as we are sitting here, change is happening.
Now, if you're a "glass half-empty" sort of person, this might terrify you to think that,
"Oh my goodness! All the things I love and respect and everything are at risk because
things are changing." If you're a "glass half-full" kind of person, you might be thinking, "Well,
I have 25,000 days in which opportunity could be coming around the corner any time." We
have both kinds of people and sometimes they're both right and wrong, and there are many,
many kinds of change.
As I suggested, change is coming at you. It might be good for you. It might be bad for
you. It might just be different. And just as change is coming at you, there are different
ways that you can try and get a hold of change and manage it so that it is either less bad
for you or actually achieve something that you're trying to achieve. Next slide please.
So there are many, many models for making change. I've selected three to talk about
today but if you were to Google "Change management" I would venture it to guess, find thousands
of publications about making change.
The first one, John Kotter's 'Leading Change' is a very classic reference I have thought.
I deliberately used Kotter's Eight Stages myself and it's what I recommend to people.
Another way to think about change is any kind of process change that you use, is change.
Many of us maybe using Lean Six Sigma, the DMAIC process to find measure, analyze and
improve control. That is changing from a less good process to a better process.
And then finally there is the kind of change that we sometimes find ourselves involved
in, which often has to do with wicked problems or the black swan or the blue goose or whatever
you want to call it. These are very complex problems and getting from here to there is
difficult when you can't be sure exactly what they are going to look like, and there are
techniques for managing that kind of change when you have to work on it as you go through
it. Next slide please.
Before I get too much into these change processes, I want to have a little word from our sponsor
about the importance of planning. To be successful in any of these kinds of processes, whether
it's John Kotter's "Leading Change - Eight States", whether it is a Lean Six Sigma type
of approach or a spiral development type of approach or anything else, you've got to incorporate
a planning process along with it.
I know that planning could be difficult in the federal government and especially in the
civilian agencies. In DoD we had the advantage of a five-year plan. Our five-year plans didn't
always work but as General Dwight Eisenhower said way back when, "It's not the plan; it's
the planning".
So the very process of defining your problem, considering what it is that you need to do,
where you want to end up, what are your options, what are the ways that you might be able to
use, and then considering all of the resources that you might need for that, regardless of
how events happen, that is a valuable process to go through and the more you accustom yourself
to the planning process, the better planner that you are, and if you're a better planner,
you're a better guesser at what kinds of things may happen to you.
So you can be ready. You can be ready either when disaster happens, and you have to figure
out how to preserve the good things that you had, or ready when an opportunity knocks.
Next slide please.
OK, so I apologize for those of you who are probably already familiar with Kotter's "Eight
Stages of Change". It is a very widely known and widely recognized recipe for achieving
cultural change. In my talk today I am going to just basically take each of these in turn
and talk a little bit about them how they might show up in your life and what kind of
advantage you can take by making use of these eight stages.
Another preliminary remark is it's important to do these more or less in sequence and if
you jump to the end and have not laid the right foundation, you probably will find that
you put yourself on the wrong track or you're looking at the wrong things or you've not
made adequate preparations for the kind of activities that you need to take on.
So a lot of people jump right to broad action or anchor changes in the culture, very anxious
to write a directive or an instruction and get the secretary design it, but that is not
how you achieve lasting change. When I first started in government a few years ago, I had
a very dear friend who had been in government, as a career, and I asked, "My God, I am going
from the private sector into the government, what is your best advice for me?"
And she said, "If you want to have lasting results from what you do, don't just go and
write up a rule and leave it to sit in a book somewhere because the next person that comes
after you can write another rule. Instead, try to influence people's habits and the way
they think," and that was the best advice I got when I came into government.
I don't worry too much about writing regulations but I do worry a lot about communicating with
people and letting them know the reasons why we should be doing things and then giving
them practice at trying to affect change, encouraging them to not to deliberately stumble
or fail but to learn from it. And those are all the most valuable advice that I received
when I came into government. So next slide.
The first thing you want to do when you anticipate the change needs to be made, is to figure
out how you are going to communicate to other people that this is important that they need
to make a priority of the urgency of the need for this change.
For those who don't know the story of the burning platform, the story is that there
was a person who was on an oil platform in oilrig out in the middle of the ocean and
it caught fire. And so this person had a choice, either to be consumed by the flames on the
platform, or to jump into the dark icy, unknown water.
He jumped and luckily he was saved, and people asked him later, "Where did you find the courage
to jump?" And he said, "Well, it's either burn up or jump, so I jumped." So that's the
story of the burning platform is, create such an urgency for people to take action that
they've just simply got to do it.
Here in government we have a lot of opportunities to be able to find something that creates
urgency. Budget cuts are on everybody's mind right now and they get more and more urgent
every day. So that's an example of something that you might be able to latch on to, to
take your idea for change and establish for other people the fact that this needs to be
taken seriously.
The second step, next slide, is to create a guiding coalition. This is especially important
in government where we tend to be kind of hierarchical. People do respond to what the
higher-level people, and the higher-level priorities, and strategies of the organization
are requiring them to do.
What a guiding coalition does is it creates a kind of a backstop for you, so that if you
are the change manager or the change leader, you can always point to those people on that
guiding coalition and say, "What can I do? The board wants this."
There are many, many ways that you can often capture an organization that already exist.
You may be able to design one and get it rolling yourself, but there are many ways. And it's
important to think about who needs to be represented on that board, what they will bring to the
table in terms of the rest of your strategy for creating cultural change. Next slide.
Obviously as the change agent you have some idea of the change that you want to make,
but you should give yourself a reality check by asking your coalition to participate in
putting that vision together. First of all, you're probably not the smartest person in
the world. I know I'm not.
I rely a lot on other people to be able to give advice about what is the actual change
that we need to make, and how are we going to do it, exactly what Sydney was referring
to earlier. Only after you form the guiding coalition in which you have influential people
behind this idea, do you want to develop your vision and strategy.
A vision, simple definition, what we want the future to look like. Strategy, to classically
define, is ends, ways, and means. I like to follow a process for thinking about strategy,
and I like to start with, "Where do we want to go?" Some people like to start with, "Where
are we now?" In my opinion, if you start with, "Where are we now," you may be constraining
yourself too much. You may be unduly influenced by all of the difficulties that you have with
your present position.
I think it's better if you start with a vision, "Where do want to go?" Then consider, "Where
are we now?" Because if you don't know where you are now, you're equally not going to be
able to get to where you want to go. Then consider the ways that you might get there,
"How will we get to that place from where we are now, not from where we wish we were,
or someplace else, but from where we are now, how do we get to our vision?"
Then finally, so important, is, "How will we know we're making progress?" I know in
the human capital world, sometimes we're not all that friendly to metrics and measures,
but they are absolutely essential. It is the same as having a speedometer on your car.
It's the same as having a compass that is exactly what you need when you are trying
to follow a vision. Next slide please.
Once you have a vision, then you need to think about how you're going to communicate it and
create a broad base of support for it. This slide started out with I think three or four
M's once upon a time, but as I think about communications just about any word that starts
with M seems to fit in.
First thing anybody will tell you is you got to have a message. The message is the absolute
essential. Once you have a message, you need to figure out who is your target audience,
how are you going to convey that message to them. It's good to have what I call a motto
of your existing bumper sticker.
It's good to have some branding around your message, so that it will be constantly reinforced.
Every time people hear that phrase or see that logo, they will be thinking about the
change that you're trying to make. Marketing is something that may not come naturally to
people in the government, but it is the way that people are persuaded and respond in every
other area of their life, so it's well worth developing your talents in that area.
Another thing that I like to emphasize with people is the importance of meetings. We are
sometimes tempted in this day and age when it's so easy to be on a "webinar," hi friends
at home, or to just send out emails, or something. It's easy to overlook the importance of people
getting together, people being in a room with other people who are likewise interested and
excited about the project, very, very essential to building up enthusiasm about the change
that you want to make.
Then finally, my favorite word, measures and metrics, very important too, so that you can
tell when your communications are working and when they are not working. Easy as that.
Next slide please.
The fifth step after creating your coalition, developing your strategy, thinking about communication,
is then to empower broad action. I would recommend a GAO report that came out a couple of years
ago which is on this very subject, and it have a lot of good advice about how to get
action moving in an organization, in a government organization.
I trust everybody has access to the slides, but the report is GAO-11-908. I think that
some of these key practices for empowering broad action should be in your toolkit. They
should be a part of your planning process. Next slide six.
Next step is to achieve short-term wins. Why would we want short term wins and not long
term wins? Actually according to the GAO, and I agree, you should be seeking for both.
There's no time like the present to start working on your long-term objectives. Famous
old saying, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is
now."
Don't overlook long-term objectives, but don't work on them exclusively so that people can
get discouraged that they're not seeing immediate result. Short-term wins are very important
for creating that enthusiasm and especially for getting people to work together. If they
can see that by working together they can succeed.
People like success. Success is a good feeling, and so the earlier you can create that in
your collaboration, the more successful the group will be because they will start collaborating
earlier, and they will learn to do it better and better as they go along.
I used the term here called, The Organizational Jujitsu. You're undoubtedly going to run into
people who are contrary, or they don't like your idea, or maybe they don't like you, or
whatever. Make them your friends. Go to them, and find out what it is that they would like
to see done, and take, as I say, the weight of their objections, and make something happen
that they have to agree, is what they want to see.
This does many things. It counts as a short term win. It hopefully makes you a new friend,
and it gets something done. Don't, at all, be reticent to go to the people who may be
not very supportive of your idea. In fact, they should be the first people that you talk
to. Find out what their problem is. Solve it for them. Next slide, seven.
Once you have begun to achieve this short-term wins, and as you are following your plan,
and keeping track of your measures, and seeing to it that things you're doing are actually
working, making adjustments if you need to, keep going and solidify your gains and achieve
more change.
Sometimes you can't predict in the beginning which changes are going to take effect at
first, but as things go along you will see that something worked, something didn't work.
Let's focus on getting the benefit of the steps that we took that worked, and working
on making some improvements to the things that we need to do that have met some resistance.
One way that we can do this, especially in the human capital community, is by aligning
employee goals with the organizational goals. We all know, as human capital professionals,
we know that people are happier, they're more engaged, when they understand that what they're
doing makes a difference for the organization, that the work they do everyday has an impact.
When we align our change management goals with people's performance, commitments, all
the more so, even the people that might have been a little iffy and not too supportive
will have a motive to jump in and get on board this change that's coming to them.
OPM defines performance management as planning work, and setting expectation, continually
monitoring performance, developing the capacity to perform, periodically rating performance,
and rewarding good performance. Guess what? That's another change management system that
is changing a less enthusiastic employee into a great high performing, productive employee.
Then our last Carter stage, once you've done all this things, you've achieved a lot of
progress, you've made a lot of change. Slide 8, anchor the changes in the culture of the
organization, and a great way to do this from our human capital perspective is through leader
development, mentoring, succession planning.
As I said, "It is not writing a rule or regulation that affects change in an organization, but
it is getting into the hearts and minds of people." It is people that make change, and
so if you concentrate on changing this people, from followers into leaders, from less productive
into more productive employees, from protégés into mentors, they will absorb the reasons
for the change and they will become, in turn, people who will be effective advocates for
the change that needs to happen in the future.
I have another great classical quote, "We are what we repeatedly do." Excellence is
not a single act but it is a habit. That's Carter's eight stages of change, and then
I just want to turn briefly to a couple other things. Changes, process, improvement. If
you'd think about change, as I said, "25,000 days of your life, every one of them involves
change." Change is something that surrounds you, and change for the better is usually
what we're looking for.
The Lean Six Sigma or other kinds of process improvement tools are valuable ways for you
to think about change. Again, Lean Six Sigma should be done in sequence. If you jump to
control, which all too often as regulators were prone to do...We haven't defined, or
measured, or analyzed the problem, we're probably not going to be able to achieve the effects
that we need. I just mention Lean Six Sigma, the DMAIC method as another way to think about
change, and it might be a tool that could be very helpful to you at a particular point.
Then finally for the graduate level change agent, complex change. Sometimes, especially
nowadays, we know there's something needs to be changed, we know there's some kind of
change needs to happen, but the problem is so big and complex, or so vague, that we don't
know quite where we need to end up.
There is a process called Spiral Development, also sometimes called evolutionary or incremental
development, by which you just start to bite off pieces of that big problem as you can.
It is, in effect, going through a change process multiple times, each time trying to make some
progress as you go along.
First you define the problem, then you get up to a point where you think you've got an
improvement, and then you look at it, evaluate it, and see, have we improved? Take stock,
start all over again. Redefine. Reassess. Go on and on.
In case you're wondering what the picture is on the left hand side, it's genetic material,
and on the right hand side is the beautiful double helix of DNA. That is the thought I'd
like to leave you with, change is life. Life is change, 25,000 days, not one is exactly
like another, but change is life. I hope that you have opportunities to see the glass half
full, and seize opportunities for change, knowing that you've got the tools to be able
to make good use of them.
Renee: Thank you, Anita. I really appreciate your tremendous insights on this topic, and
I really enjoyed your personal stories along the way. It really hits home, the whole process
of what we're here addressing. I did want to share with everyone that we will be providing
the slides, so if you want to take a few highlights that's fine, but you don't have to spend a
lot of energy taking copious notes. Everyone who's registered will receive the slides today.
I do want to open the floor for one to two questions. We do have someone in our green
room who's available to receive questions from our webcast participants as well. Are
there any questions? If you have a question, I ask that you please stand. We do have someone
who will be bringing a mic up to you. Any questions for Anita?
No? Oh, there's one.
Rhonda: Hi. My name is Rhonda [inaudible 00:32:47] , and I work at the Met. We are in the midst
of change, but because we have people who are chain of command oriented, what I observe
is us having a lot of trouble getting to the root cause of what our problem is so that
we'll know the right change. How do we get people's mindset to get away from chains of
command, because a lot of the very good ideas that are coming from the bottom never make
it to the top so that we can really effect some change.
Anita: I would recommend that you practice some organizational jiu-jitsu in a case like
that. You do have some flexibility at the bottom. I would say to people, you may not
control the world, but you do control something. You may just control your desk, but you've
got that.
I would encourage that people from the bottom begin to develop some of those short wins,
or quick wins, that begin to demonstrate to the people that you need to persuade that
you're at the point of creating the burning platform, establishing the urgency. If people
who are wanting to see their higher level leadership take this on, they need to begin
communicating that there's an urgency to this, and that there is an answer, but that you
need the leadership. I just say to people, seize whatever you've got. [laughs]
Rhonda: Thanks.
Renee: Any other questions around the room? No one? OK. We're going to proceed to our
next presenter. We have a total of three presenters today. You're going to see a lot of correlations,
providing building blocks along the way.
Our second presenter is Mr. Reese Madsen, Junior. Reese was appointed at the DOD, Intelligence
Chief Learning Officer within the Human Capital Management Office for the Under Secretary
of Defense for Intelligence in January 2006.
He is responsible for the development of policy, oversight, and guidance of training, education,
and nationally accredited certification of civilian and military defense, intelligence,
and security positions within the DOD, its component agencies and military services.
He is also the chairman of the DOD Intelligence Training and Education Board.
Mr. Madsen retired with 24 years of distinguished career with the United States Coast Guard.
His last position was as the Services Intelligence Workforce Manager, responsible for managing
all human capital initiatives for the rapidly growing program.
At a national level, he highlighted the Coast Guard as a unique instrument of national security,
and was responsible for the Coast Guard becoming the 14th member of the intelligence community,
and getting all of the services new intelligence authorities. He received many civilian awards
from the Director of National Intelligence and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
and was featured as a leading federal Chief Learning Officer in the May 2012 CLO magazine.
Reese is now going to share his leadership perspective on how the Department of Defense
Intelligence Learning Enterprise fundamentally changed after 9/11. His briefing describes
eight steps of change with excellent examples of what was needed at each step. Reese, you
may begin. Thank you for coming.
Reese Madsen: Thank you, OPM, for inviting me. I'm very honored to be here and share
my story. Believe it or not, we did not coordinate our briefings. For every step that Anita Blair
went through in her slides, I have a firm example of what we did to effect change in
my enterprise.
Twenty-four years in the Coast Guard, I had been implementing change forever. This is
the first opportunity that I could help facilitate change and the eight steps of change. It's
really, either unbeknownst to me or my superb planning, worked out so that we were all covered.
So I think it's important that you have an example that you can see and smell and touch
and taste to see how it actually happened and how we fundamentally changed. Next slide.
The first thing is the burning platform. Congress helped us out there, and of course, 9/11.
That was important because Congress signed out the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist
Prevention Act of 2004 to say, hey, we've got to do better. From my perspective, I work
in the learning environment, in the learning enterprise.
We can help change people's mindsets and cultures. We have a Congressional mandate, and we have
all the different documents that cascade from a national to a department to an agency, all
of them saying similar things. We need to change. Certain things happened, we don't
want them to happen again.
The documents, the strategies, the plans, all those help to put a finer point on some
of the changes that we want, or need, to make. Some of them are new initiatives, which are
important, but some are also to help improve existing initiatives, and some are to strengthen
programs and agencies as a whole. They all fit together. At the end of the day, they
all, the documents, the burning platforms, Congress, your secretaries, are all helping
to push start your change. Next slide.
Creating a guiding coalition. This was probably a challenge for us, because my enterprise
is on the left, to include the services and some very large and very powerful agencies.
Services have been around for a couple of centuries. Some of these agencies have been
around since World War II. The other folks on the right-hand side are some of our stakeholders,
and those stakeholders are part of our coalition.
They are either using our training, or we are using their training, or we have an interest
in having a similar standard, or to have something to help us all. We want a tide that's going
to raise all boats. This was important for all of us to get together because we all have
a vested interest in changing, and this was the beginning.
I think a lot in metaphors, so this metaphor is when you're on a battleship and you want
to turn around, you've got to turn the wheel now, and in a couple of hours you'll be there,
but you have to start somewhere. This was that first opportunity to get everyone together.
That included leaders, the Under Secretaries, the Director of National Intelligence, the
four-star generals, the agency heads, but that wasn't enough, so we also brought this
in from an operational perspective. We looked at our functional managers, those people who
are driving the mission. As I stated before, coming from the learning enterprise, the learning
enterprise can help get the change into the training, the education, the professional
development. So it was important to have them involved as well.
It was a full-court press to get everybody who had a vested interest to come along with
the same message and be that coalition. Working at the senior level, the operational level,
and the learning level, that really helped to start the process, using the burning platform
to get things moving. Next.
This is probably the key. Now that you have everyone at the table, you have the mandate,
what are you going to do about it? We probably spent more time getting these nine words right.
The amount of time per word was key. We needed to have everyone see themselves in this vision.
We needed everyone to be able to understand it, so the simpler, the better.
Of course the KISS principle, keep it simple, s'il vous plait, that works because now people
can rally around it, people can understand it, people can now take that and work with
it. Getting that right will help you, and it goes a long, long way to helping move the
change that much further, faster.
The simpler, the better. This is truly the point that Anita was talking about on the
horizon. This is what we're going to look like when we're done. We don't know when that's
going to be, but we know we want that unified and integrated intelligence and security workforce.
Now we have a point on the horizon. How are we going to get there? Next slide.
Communicating. That's where a lot of work comes in. This is where you take the messages,
you take the leadership, you take the words, and you try to spin this tale that you want
everyone to understand, to help them help you get the change.
Going back to step one, we took the burning platform, we came up with the vision and the
mission. Then we said, all right, to do that, we're going to do this. We started with our
boss, Dr. Vickers, at the time it was Dr. Cambone. The Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence owns and operates all this stuff, the policy oversight and guidance, so it was
important to have him start the conversation. That's key, of course, but, next slide.
Our workforce is multigenerational. I have, truly, 80-year-old PhD scientists doing work,
but we also have 17-year-old high school graduates that are part of this workforce. They don't
learn the same, and they don't communicate the same.
We tried to put a full-court press on with memos. We had websites. We had flyers. We
had any number of things that we could use, looking at professional communications plans,
looking at technology, looking at the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense, how could we
leverage all that to get the word out on how we need to move forward together? That was
key.
Let me draw your attention to the document on the right-hand side. That is our keystone.
That is truly where all the big messages reside.
If there's one thing that I see the most, people put this up in their cube, we update
it every year, it has our principles, which are important, especially in the intelligence
and security world, we have our vision and mission, so everyone is reminded of that,
but we also put the stakeholders. These are the people that we want you to feel are part
of the, not the problem, but part of the solution, because we are all in it together.
Here's something that we didn't talk about. We have a mantra. This is really where people
can start to say, "Oh, I didn't think about things like that." We want to train as we
operate. We want to align learning with mission dynamics. The learners have to keep up with
the things going on in operations.
Our last one is to create an interdependent learning environment. We don't want everyone
doing their own thing, we want them to work together, we want them to collaborate, and
we want to get to that integrated workforce that we talked about before. So we update
this every year, we vote on it every year, because we have tweaked it, because we need
to reflect the stakeholders' interest in it, but on the bottom we have our priorities and
our milestones.
That helps remind people, this is what we're doing right now to get to where we need to
be, to address our vision and mission. That has helped, and that also goes a long way
to remind people of all the work they've done before, and to keep things moving. Next slide.
This is probably the toughest one, because in government it's tough to empower broad
action when all that power, all that authority, and all that responsibility tends to lie with
the Secretary. This is where we can help the Secretary, or anyone in leadership, be able
to fulfill what we talked about in the vision and the mission.
Everything from having a common lexicon, I can't tell you how many different definitions
of training and education, fairly simple words, everyone had a different view of it. Let's
get them in a room, lock the door, and nobody leaves until we agree on certain definitions.
Luckily we have a very robust policy group, and a powerful policy factory, so we have
a lot of documents that have previously defined some of our words that we need, but not all
of them. We try to pull from what's currently available, that everyone already agreed to,
and then supplement it with new words that we need to address our current vision and
mission.
But that's the tip of the iceberg, that's just the words. You've got to get to the standards,
you've got to get to the technology, you've got to get to all the pieces that are interrelated,
that come together. If you can't agree to the words, you can't get to the systems and
all the other pieces.
This has probably taken the longest amount of time, just to get the right people, because
some of them are not the same people. You have policy people, you have trainers, you
have operators, you have CIO folks and the IT people, so we have to be very specific
that this is the issue we want to talk about this time.
I don't care who you send, but send the right person who can either understand it or represent
your equities, and we'll take it from there. If I had to encapsulate this, I would say
we try to command by negation, which is a military term that talks about keep doing
what you're doing until you're told not to do it.
So we have the mandate, we have the vision and mission, we have the beginnings of what
we need to do. Now we're going to do it until somebody says no. That has helped, because
frankly there really wasn't anyone in my position before 2006. Nobody really cared about all
of these programs.
We didn't have policy, we didn't have training councils, we had very few, a handful. They
were OK, some of them were very successful, some were dying on the vine, but now you have
somebody at the department level who actually cares. We want to help you help us.
The cartoon on the bottom is actually fairly indicative of what we witnessed over the last
few years. Pre-9/11, everyone did what they wanted to do because they could. After 9/11,
there was a mandate to do something. I don't care what it is, but you've got to do something.
The DITEB, that's the DOD Training and Education Board, that helped me get everyone in the
room focused in a similar direction.
Obviously, we want to get to our end state, which is that integrated workforce and enterprise.
There's a lot of stuff that we still have to do, but we know that we have to do it,
we have a process, and we're moving in the right direction. Next slide.
OK. If I had to pick one of our initiatives, we are moving out in nationally accredited
certification programs. This one initiative, amongst all the other stuff that we're doing,
this makes people's hair hurt, because it's so new, it hasn't been done in our particular
world of work, and it has been a challenge. Everyone knows that it takes a lot of work,
it takes a lot of codification, it takes a lot of background, it takes a lot of documentation.
So, what do we do? Well, it's like eating an elephant. You've got to take it one bite
at a time.
So, get your short-term wins. Figure out who the functional managers are. Empower them.
They're the ones that we want to take charge and to guide this. They need to know their
workforce. They need to know their skills. They need to know what is needed to do their
mission. OK?
Now, we got that done. Next short win. Let's focus on the competencies. We worked with
the director of national intelligence and we all agreed to certain competencies. The
ones that we knew we needed right away and those things are always in development and
being updated, and we'll probably have a few more by the time we're done. We all agreed
to that. What's next?
Now we start getting into policy, where we have certification manuals. This is just the
tip of the iceberg. This just tells you who is doing what, who is authorized to do what,
who is responsible for doing what. It just lays the plan, this is how we're going to
do it.
Then it's up to the functional manager to bring them all together and decide how best
to approach that functional area for skill standards. Are we going to train to it? Are
we going to have an educational component? Are we going to have an experiential component?
Are we going to do everything OJT?
In my world of work, it's inherently governmental. It's tough to find somebody who's doing counterintelligence
in a school somewhere. So we bring people into the intelligence community, primarily
DOD, and we teach them tradecraft. That's primarily done within the government. You
don't want other folks doing that.
These are the high-visibility, high-stakes jobs that you want to have the assurance that
they know what they're doing, and that they are meeting the rules, they are producing
what you need them to do. It's like going to a doctor. Don't you kind of want that doctor
to be board-certified? You have intel and security folks who have access to very sensitive,
very important information, or people, or programs. Don't you want them to be held to
a fairly rigid standard? That's what we've done.
We have had our first program, nationally accredited, the first one federal government,
which is counter intuitive to what we do because we do everything behind closed doors and behind
a cloak. Now we're having an outside party who review our processes to see the same level
of standard that your doctors, your lawyers, your beauticians or mechanics are held to.
We found that to be very important and everyone has been pretty well supportive in developing
that.
I have a whole bunch of more coming, but we will get there. Between that, key to the success
of this is breaking down what you want done. Because everyone will put up their shield
and say, "We are different, we can't do that." Well, you can. Once you deconstruct it, then
people are going to see that true building block level capability. That's all we are
building is the capability.
Then they say, "Oh. We do that." We do that with our civilians, we may do that with our
enlisted force, we may do that with contractors, we may do that in academia. But we do it.
That was the key to get everyone to the table and then build from those building blocks.
Those were the short-term wins, but we are still producing and we will probably continue
to produce for quite some time. Next slide.
This is a pretty busy slide, but this is truly the history of our measurement and that's
where I need us to be talking about. If you don't have that measurement, don't know did
you progress or did you regress, are you there? You have to be able to tell people, your boss,
congress, somebody, the health and wealth of what you are doing. Before my position,
we never had that.
When we started in the bottom of Ten Corner, I could only tell you, we had a bunch of students
take a bunch of training. That's good. Next year we had this many students of this type,
taking this course, this amount of courses of this type. "OK, that sounds good. Tell
me more."
The next year this amount of students of this type took this training of this type in this
functional area. So now I can tell you how many people took cyber-training. How many
people took leadership training? So, we're building and building and building and that's
OK, but that's still just talking about activity. I need to know are we ready to do our mission.
That's where we started moving into the nationally accredited certification programs where we
have the assurance of the capability to perform that mission and this year is the first year
that we added fiduciary information. Because of sequestration and everything else going
on, we now have a much greater interest in what is my return on investment. What am I
getting for my money? What did I just buy?
More importantly is if I had one more dollar, should I dedicate it to building one more
person who can do that job or have that one person improved to the next level of certification?
We can start making those strategic decisions, or at least have the information to make those
decisions and tell Congress, "Yeah, we're that much more improved." Or, if Congress
wants, they say, "Well, you're not good enough. I need more level threes."
Now we can tell you it costs this much money to build a level one certified security professional.
It costs this much more to get to level two and this much more to get level three. Could
be linear, could be exponential, but you don't know until you've gone through this painful
process of being able to measure it, have it make sense and have it make an impact.
So, moving from activity to readiness and performance is tough because we're measuring
things we've never measured before and we're reporting things we've never reported before.
Baby steps were key in getting this. In the next probably one or two years we'll probably
be able to tell folks exactly what our enterprise is doing at certain cost and break it down
to a much better level to make better strategic decisions. Next.
Now that you're all done you've got to set it in stone. DOD does that in spades. We have
more policy out there than most. Everything that I just talked about equates to 21 different
policies. Those are all the policy oversight and guidance that I do right now.
There will probably be more, but what we have, and this is a good diagram to say, "Hey, my
boss has got policy, I got policy, you got policy, your training council's got policy,
your certification's got policy," and that's how you codify all the work that's you've
done and that's important, especially in DOD.
Now that we have it signed in policy you can get resources to it, you can build things
to it, you can train to it. All these things are important because until you've written
them down, "Eh, it's not that important." But, once you go through the policy process,
and it is a painful process, but when you are done, it is good as gold, because now
everyone has agreed to it.
Some people don't always agree, but they can live with it and we have something that we
can use and leverage and build and resource to. So, that's important and then from my
perspective I now have something that I can do oversight with, and so, this is standard.
Are you meeting the standard? Great.
Guidance. I can now provide better guidance. Policy doesn't always tell you everything,
so we supplement it with guidance or memos or a message going back to that communication,
so we can tweak it to either improve it, clarify it or help the components implement it better.
Other oversight aspects that I don't have on there, but we do staff assistant visits.
We go out with a small team to the schoolhouses. If that doesn't mean a lot to them that somebody
in DC from the Department actually cares enough to show up, ask the right questions and engage
with them. That's not oversight, that's just good business. And so, we have been very successful
in doing that and it helps the change process a lot.
We do deep dives. We've done that through our resource people. We want to focus on a
particular issue. We work with the IGs, the Inspector Generals. We work with GAO, I'm
a big fan of GAO because they have a lot of the analysts that can take a non-involved
person and take a look at issues. And training is looked at a great deal.
Last year we did a Congressional directed action where Congress said, "Well tell us,
how are you doing? How are you training your workforce? What are you doing with your certifications?
How are they being applied?" And that also helps. Helps with messaging, helps with the
oversight and helps with the guidance. So, that's what I did this summer.
[laughter]
And I think, if I could leave with one thought. I guess I would give you my philosophy of
change. As you know I came from the Coast Guard. And their motto is semper paratus,
always ready. But, as you've seen from the reality shows the Coast Guard doesn't always
operate in the most pleasant environments, either in the North Pacific off Alaska or
in the tornadoes of the East Coast.
So the philosophy of change is much like Mother Nature. It's not to be feared, but it's to
be respected. And the more you prepare for it, the more you can react to it and come
out better on the other side. So I hope I provided some of that to you in our very specific
example, based on the philosophical areas of Carters Change Management. I will take
any questions.
Renee: Are there any questions from the audience?
[background noises only]
Audience Member: Reese, may I ask, have you found that change becomes...is there an end
to it?
Reese: Well I seriously doubt it because we didn't anticipate sequestration and that was
a huge change in the environment where we were, which really causes concern and sometimes
people lose focus. And they're only looking at the resource end of it, when they should
be looking at the efficiency and effectiveness which you talked about as well.
So I think its key that you prepare yourselves, that you are semper paratus and be able to
build programs that can either expect or be agile enough to respond to whatever change
may be. It could be a resources, it could be a rift, it could be a new war, it could
be a new department, it could be a new policy. But, all of those are changes that you have
to deal with, your burning platform.
Renee: Thank you. Thank you. This is very good, very good information and is so true
to the times that we're currently in. No one knows what the future is going to hold. So
this is excellent information, concrete examples that I believe we can all take back to our
home fronts and apply personally as well as professionally. So thank you again.
We do have one final presentation, our third speaker, who's not here physically in the
room with us. However he is participating with us virtually from a remote location.
Our third and final presenter is Mr. Jason Parman.
Greg, if you can do me a favor? OK. It's up there. We have a photo of him. It's always
good to be able to put a face with the name.
Let me tell you a little bit about Jason Parman. Jason serves as the HR Strategy Manager for
the US Office of Personnel Management, HR Solutions Organization. In this role Jason
directs OPM Strategic Human Capital Consulting Services nationwide, delivering customers
agencies the best strategies today for the best workforce tomorrow. He previously served
as OPM as an HR Consultant Director of OPMs Midwest Services Branch and Nationwide Program
Manager for workforce succession planning.
Prior to his federal service he worked in human resources for Tracker Marine the world's
largest manufacturer of fishing boats. Jason has spoken in 42 states addressing such diverse
topics as running a Federal HR Consulting Business, organization design, leadership
development, succession planning, veterans preference and federal hiring flexibilities.
He has a broad, broad background. And so does our other presenters too.
So it's quite fitting to have him here today. His presentation is titled "Furlough Impact
and HR Change Management Assistance." So what I'm going to do now. Let's test just to see
if Jason can hear me and if he's on the line. Jason can you hear me?
Jason Parman: I can hear you just fine and I am on the line. Can you hear me all right?
Renee: Excellent. We can hear you just fine. I'm going to turn it over to you now thanks.
Jason: Fantastic and thank you very much for that introduction. I am Jason Parman from
sunny Kansas City, Missouri, which, if you're following baseball is currently the home of
the American League Central first place Kansas City Royals Baseball Club.
[laughter]
Now, I don't know how many of you in the auditorium or out there online are baseball fans. But
historically speaking you recognize the need for me to say Kansas City is the home of the
first place Royals, because if statistics hold up the next time I will be able to say
that is the year 2032.
[laughter]
So I'm going to go ahead and say it right now. Actually for those of you who are in
DC right now but have never had the chance to come out and visit us in Kansas City. Basically,
you just take DC replace all the cars and your famous beltway with cows and our famous
big belt buckles. And you've got Kansas City. But you guys don't really care about that.
You'd like to hear about some of the topics we've agreed to speak about today.
So let's go ahead and begin with the title slide of our presentation. And as you said
earlier, we're talking today about furlough impacts and some of the change management
assistance that my part of OPM. The Human Resources Solutions Division has been assisting
agencies with. We're going to talk specifically about furloughs, change management, get into
some organizational design discussions and some talk about restructuring.
Now, I would like to thank both Anita and Reese for providing that excellent foundation
on leading and managing change. I'm going to get a bit technical in this presentation
because we're going to focus on some of the things we're seeing out there with our federal
agency customers given the current environment and the things that are kind of upon all of
us.
And I'll be focusing on both the organizational aspects and the very human personal aspects
of change that we're seeing out then in the federal space right now and some ways in which
we're dealing with those in partnership with our agency clients. First, before we do any
of that, how about a word about change? Next slide, please.
I love this quote. "Most people hate any kind of change unless it jingles in their pockets,"
because, of course, that makes me think of the Georgia Satellites. [sings] "I got a little
change in my pocket going jingle-ingle-ing," which even with that horrible rendition leads
me to the song's title, "Keep Your Hands to Yourself," which is, not coincidentally, exactly
what most of us think about when we're dealing with organizational change.
"Stay away from us, we don't particularly like it," especially this externally or environmentally
driven organizational change that many of us are encountering right now. From the employee's
perspective, change is often perceived, especially when there are external influencers to that
change, it's often received with fear or insecurity, uncertainty, frustration, resentment. Sometimes
even sadness, extreme periods of emotion or depression and a general pervasive sense of
unfairness or even in extreme terms betrayal or distrust.
From the manager's perspective change can also impact performance. Sometimes these drastic
or imparted changes can lead to absenteeism, increased turnover as Sydney so eloquently
pointed out at the beginning of this presentation, increased retirements over our initial projections.
It can actually lead to lost time accidents, increased complaints and grievances and it
can amplify what we call the emotional content of work.
These connotations tied to very real, very personal emotions that people bring to the
job every day. It's what gives out federal employees their passion for their jobs. It's
what makes them excellent on any given day, but it can also be turned to the dark side
and amplified in a negative manner if we continue to pile on a great deal of change without
some over-arching semblance of control, either in the organization or at the individual level.
All of these things kind of coalesce to make many of the organizational changes we're experiencing
right now a fairly difficult challenge for employees, for managers and for agencies at
large.
What I'm going to talk about for the next 10 to 12 minutes are some of the things that
we see out there with our clients and how they are, sometimes with our resistance, sometimes
without, dealing with some of these very important issues. Now, just a little bit about us, my
organization and how we've been asked to change in the recent past. Next slide.
You'll see it says, "About us" and you'll see a listing of the HR solutions, divisions,
location. Little stars right there on the map designating our locations. But it's important
to remember that my particular corner of OPM began, like many other government agencies,
as a monopoly. We used to do all the staffing for virtually every civilian federal agency
back in the day.
As we changed and evolved and as we were asked to change by Congress telling us we needed
to become a reimbursable entity and then taking away our share of the appropriations for doing
what we used to do, we've changed and evolved into a fully reimbursable HR service provider
and a competitor in the federal HR marketplace.
That's an existential change that happened over the last 15 to 20 years and it has fundamentally
impacted both the way in which we do our business of HR, but also the employees we've retained
and or hired and or separated into our organization.
I tell you this just to give you a bit of context about my universe and my universe
includes working with about 156 different federal agency customers all around the country,
including Guam and Puerto Rico and a couple of places over the pond, on the very real,
very critical strategic human capital management issues that they face.
We do this as consultants. We do this in partnership with our excellent resources and our policy
and oversight offices in OPM, but often we are the boots on the ground that go out and
help interject the technical HR interventions related to organizational change out there
in the field or in some cases headquarters components. That's a little bit about who
we are and what we do, but let's get back to talking about the changes we're seeing
out there in the federal space. Next slide, please.
Let's move right to one of the big ones we're seeing right now and that's furloughs. Furloughs,
or as I affectionately refer to them, the new "F" word in government circles. It's furlough.
We're not big fans of furloughs because from an individual perspective, furloughs create
uncertainty, they create an instability, a lack of continuity in the individuals experience.
But from an organizational perspective, furloughs can be difficult to implement, they can cause
uncertainty, do we need to do it, do we not need to do it, but even implementing the technical
aspects of a furlough can be a difficult thing to do. Now OPM has had a series of furlough
calls providing technical guidance around furlough policy and things like that, and
that's excellent.
We really appreciate that from our policy side at OPM, but administrative furloughs
can create administrative nightmares because of the need to implement them in a particular
way and then recognizing that some of them may be called back. Some of them may be nullified,
our recent experience with the Federal Aviation Administration and their on-again-off-again
experience with furloughs indicates that that's a possibility.
Because of the nature of a furlough, because it is an adverse action outside the specific
rules of reduction in force and it's treated as a personnel action, many agencies simply
don't have a continuity of capability in administering furloughs. They just don't have to do them
that often, so they lose some of that capability.
So, it's important to focus on not just the over-arching strategic aspects that furloughs
bring, but the technical and administrative challenges, too, because when you get down
to the line level, these folks that have to make it work every day for you, often it's
those technical processes that snag them up and cause the additional feelings of stress,
difficulty with managing change, things like that.
One of the things, I find it interesting, that we're finding as we continue to talk
with our agency partners is that they almost always begin their conversations with us with
questions about furloughs, how to implement them, how to decide whether they need them,
things like that.
Almost always the conversation then evolves to and moves to talking about some of these
bigger issues of change management, specifically organizational change. Almost in every case
now with our clients the current external environment has asked them to really take
a look at potential large-scale changes in the makeup of their organization.
Maybe they are losing a key mission or functional area. Maybe one mission or functional area
needs to be absorbed into another area. In certain cases some agency clients are being
asked to add functional areas because they're going away from other agency components Things
like that.
Structural change, realignments, reassignments, transfers of function, all technical processes
associated with tactical change, furloughs. Really these things all get right down to
the question, "Hey, how do we continue to meet our mission with fewer people? Where
does the work go?" That's one of my favorite questions.
And often that's the question that stays unresolved even through some of the more strategic discussions
on how to handle furloughs and how to handle some of these organizational changes, but
it's a question that must be answered and often must be answered at the very technical
level. Where does the work go?
One of the other interesting things we're finding is that once we've talked through
some of these organizational change needs and some of these structural change needs,
one of the things we're finding agencies are realizing is that the things that didn't necessarily
matter so much when FTEs and funding or monetary resources were plentiful suddenly matter a
great deal when you start talking about potential reductions in force, furloughs, transfers
of function and the like.
Those are things like what we would call soft skills or general competencies. Things like
interpersonal skills, writing, speaking, things of that nature which then translates into
some specific job skills. Resume writing, interviewing skills. These things are especially
important and their importance is amplified during times of change.
One of the things I would encourage you, regardless of your role in the organization, to think
about is not just the strategic aspects of the change you're being asked to implement
or the changes you're considering making, but the specific tactical and technical processes
that underpin those changes and the competencies, especially the soft skills type competencies
that your workforce is going to have to have, or have refreshed all throughout this period
of change.
Many times when we go into an agency and we start asking around, when we get to those
line levels, if they've got the strategic components locked down, the questions almost
always revolve around tactical, technical and then capability questions with the workforce
or those soft skills issues. Next slide, please.
Again, dealing with furlough support and change management support some of the ways in which
we've been helping from an organizational perspective include strategic planning, not
in the grand strategic planning sense so much, but just strategizing and prioritizing options
on change events related to furloughs, transfers of function, downsizing, reduction in force.
We often are asked to implement or interpret OPM policy guidance, things like that. We
do that with the able guidance and steady hand from our policy partners at OPM. They
help us out by giving us their expertise on that. We are engaged heavily with workforce
and workload analyses. We do a lot of organizational and employee data preparations for reductions
in force and other organizational changes and I'll touch on that again here in a moment.
We do provide some technical change management and leadership or change leadership training
and one that I'll come back to is counsel on use of the auto-red program and I'll talk
on that in just a moment.
Again though, often what we're finding is when we go into an agency and they say we're
facing these changes, the high-level or strategic needs of the agency are often met because
typically the agency executives are very, very effective. They are getting together,
getting a common factor, identifying the strategic needs and then making some strategic decisions
about the direction of the agency. Often those are met.
What's then left to do is the implementation and that gets into deep technical, even sometimes
obscure support processes that sometimes agencies just don't have a great handle on. Next slide
please.
So in talking about organizational structure from a tactical perspective, one of the things
I'd like to point out to you is often if agencies get the chance to do this, can use these external
or environmentally driven changes as an opportunity to spend a little bit of time on the organizational
and process issues that have been driving them crazy to probably forever.
In almost every case when we go out to agencies, they talk about things like an inequitable
workload or distribution of work, a workflow that reflects antiquated processes and technology
that just hasn't been upgraded. They talk about and sometimes complaint about, depending
on who we work with, delegations of authority or to lack thereof the difficulty by which
things can get done and approved in their particular component.
Those three things are very technical things that can be streamlined, modified and proved
and often agencies use an externally driven change as an opportunity to spend some time
on these things and change them up and improve them. So we do a lot of work helping agencies
with those specific things.
The only other thing I had mentioned on that last bullet right there, we're actually doing
a lot of work with agencies who are needing to serve, to increase their staff in certain
concentrated areas to support new and timely mission functions. You wouldn't necessarily
think that anyone was surging in any area right now but what we found is that while
the great majority of agencies are scaling back or holding down the FTE numbers, things
like that.
There are a couple of pockets that are verifying the assistance that are being needed and we're
assisting agencies in searching to meet that capacity need. Next slide please.
Some of the other technical interventions that I hope you'll consider if you are looking
at organizational change, are looking at current and future state at the e-counts, re engineering
the major functions of business processes, but right down at the very end of that slide
is something that gets overlooked from time-to-time and I'll implore you to not overlook that
if you are engaged in an organizational change that's going to impact your workforce, and
that is simply correcting errors or inconsistencies in your HR data.
Everything from position descriptions now I know, if I could see you out in that room
and online, every single person on this call has a position description that's absolutely
accurate and it's been updated in the last year to reflect exactly what you do at your
job. I can't hear you laughing but some of you are laughing right now because some of
you haven't had an updated position description in decades, and we know because we see that
when we go out and look at these.
To the extent possible, when you're looking at these environmentally-driven changes, try,
try, try to make sure your foundational documents are correct, your OPS reflects the correct
competitive level codes, your org charts reflect who is actually sitting where, your span of
control, your functional statements.
All of those things really need to be rock solid and this is one thing that agencies
put off or sometimes forget about until a crisis pops up and then they have to go back
and circularize and refresh all of these things. So it's a tremendously difficult task for
many agencies. Next slide.
As we're reaching workforce restructuring, one of the things I wanted to point out is
again, the accuracy of organizational data information. It's just crucial in developing
your options and strategy, should you have to consider a formal restructuring of your
workforce, defining organizational or geographic competitive areas related to reduction in
force, doing accurate and sustainable position descriptions, accurate and sustainable competitive
level and competitive level codes, and composite and defensible position classification.
Because it all really comes down to this, when you're talking about formal workforce
restructurings, and all of our assistance here is geared towards these three things,
consistency, continuity and defensibility.
Consistency in decision making, assigning codes and definitions, determining better
analogy building preference, continuity in all of your sources of information, from your
database of record to your official personnel file, to retention registers or your data
that's put into an auto-red type software, if you are using automated reduction enforce
software, ensuring that all sources contain the exact and correct information.
And defensibility, or in all challenges from appeals or grievances, are limited to assignment
decisions and not the integrity of the data or the strategy you've chosen to use. Those
are things that we remind our agency customers. They are just absolutely critical when you
are considering a formal workforce restructure. Next slide please.
You'll find on this slide a number of bullets that deal with some very technical processes
and related services that we've been providing out there with our agency customers.
But what I'd like to say simply around this issue of reduction in force in terms of the
over side its administration and guidance, is that when we go out with agencies we find
that as long as they are able to connect their reduction in force processes and any associated
software they might be using for that, with the federal classification standards, with
appropriate viewing processes, while still adhering to and applying the red cover to
those areas, once they have ensured that these processes are aligned.
And as we said earlier, that they have consistency, continuity and defensibility in this formal
process, then agencies are much better prepared to handle the organizational challenges but
they are also better prepared to handle the human challenges because at the end of the
day, if you have a proposed restructuring, if you have a transfer of function or a reduction
in force, you are going to get very specific questions from employees.
They don't need to be made happy necessarily. They are not going to like the answers you
give them all the time but they are going to respect the answers you give, if you can
be [inaudible 01:30:04] , consistent and factual from the very earliest point in process with
them.
If you tell them all you know and if you tell them what you know and you know it's correct,
then employees are going to give you much more of the benefit of the doubt as you go
through the process than if you simply don't have your [inaudible 01:30:25] crossed and
your eyes dotted and you're not sure of the integrity of your data. So again, those foundational
underpinnings, start with the data, then roll right up to the technical processes and then
obviously those are manifest in the over-arching strategy.
So I think now let's go to the next slide and I'll just say this, that's a little bit
about what we've seen out there in the agency landscape. I would love to continue to talk
with you about this but I know that we're out of time. So please remember, I have a
9-year-old daughter, when I've said in the words of the immortal Carley Ray Jackson,
"Hey, I just met you and this is crazy. So here's my number, call me maybe."
That's my direct phone number right there. It's my direct email address that you'll see
on that slide, and I do encourage you to give me a call or send me an email if you have
questions, if you like to talk about some of the other things we've been doing with
agencies, or if you just like to get a level check as to where you are in your organizational
change and you might like to compare that to where some of our other agency customers
are. I'll be glad to talk with you.
I'll turn the floor back over to the folks there in the auditorium and I thank you for
your time.
Renee: Thank you Jason. We all know you're not physically here; we feel like you are
here with us. Thank you, good information. Are there any questions for Jason? I see a
hand. A mic is coming your way.
Bill: Thank you. I am Bill [inaudible 01:32:00] , United States Citizenship Integration Services.
The question I have actually for you Jason, has to do with, has the HR Solutions Division
considered the designing or developing a knowledge warehouse of best practices in terms of strategic
change management, much of what we heard earlier from our first two speakers?
I am curious if there is an access similar to sort of a database where people can get
access to change management initiatives, lessons learned, points of contact, just basically
learning quickly and accessing what's needed in terms of change strategies that are effective
for the agency.
Jason: Thank you. I think I heard that correctly. First of all, I think you asked if there was
either currently existing or we're considering developing kind of a data warehouse of best
practices related to organizational change that might be accessible to those involved
in it that had some promising practices or lessons learned, some agency points of contacting,
did I hear that correctly?
Renee: Yes, you did.
Jason: OK good. I'll tell you this, we have some fairly extensive lessons learned and
points of contact and kind of it's not any formal database but we do have a kind of a
shared file system that's searchable and things like that on our various change management
interventions with customers and things like that. I don't know personally of a central
repository for the government of that kind of information.
I think it's absolutely worth exploring and maybe immediately comes to mind is OMB's MAC
site. I get so much good information off the MAC site in various places, maybe that would
even be a great place to host something like that, and I am just speaking for my part of
the organization. We'd absolutely contribute to something like that with our past experiences
since we do get to work with so many different agencies and have these kind of shared experiences.
I think it's a great suggestion, even if I clearly didn't get to answer your question
satisfactorily.
Renee: Anymore questions and comments? OK, in closing I want to thank everyone for coming
out today. I particularly want to thank our fabulous presenters to provide us some rock
solid information, strategies and tips that we can take back with us. We really appreciate
having you here today and I really want to also thank our core team of folks who assist
with registration, turning of slides, checking, passing of the mics. Without all of you guys
here together this event would not have been successful.
As I mentioned earlier, we will be providing slides for today's events. So for those who
registered, just be aware we will be providing that information to you. After this event,
this webcast, we will be posting on OPM's media center. So keep a look out for that.
Also if you have additional questions after this event, later in the week, as soon as
around this topic, we encourage you to go to our email address box which is swptraining@opm.gov.
Again, that's swptraining@opm.gov and what we'll do is we will respond to your questions
accordingly.
The gentleman who just asked the question about lessons learned, we will also follow
up on that as well. I do believe it's information of OMB. I think the mails would be some information
on HRU but I'd like to further explore it and get back to you.
So again, we welcome your questions and your suggestions. We did provide a survey for those
that are in the room. I ask that you could please take a few minutes and fill that out.
It helps us to make adjustments and targeting this is going to be a value to you and your
agencies.
Also those who are participating at webcast, you will receive the link for the survey.
So we ask if you could immediately complete that and turn it back to us. Thank you all
for your time. This concludes today's event. Have a wonderful afternoon.
