U.S. Office of Personnel Management - Ensuring the Federal Government has an effective civilian workforce

As part of the recent restructuring of the Office of Personnel Management to a results oriented structure, the functions of the former Office of Work/Life Programs have been realigned between two new organizations.

• The Work Life Group in the Division for Strategic Human Resources Policy has responsibility for the design of policy and programs to ensure that the Government's work life programs support strategic human capital investments. The Group develops policy frameworks and provides guidance to the agencies to support effective agency work life programs. The manager for the Work Life Group is Bonnie Storm. The Work Life Group may be contacted at 606-1858. Further information on their program is available on the web at http://www.opm.gov/wrkfam.
• The Benefits Officers Training and Development Group (BOTDG) in the Division for Human Capital Leadership and Merit Systems Accountability has responsibility for developing training and resources for agency work life coordinators, and also provides technical assistance to agency work life coordinators. The manager for BOTDG is Ray Kirk. BOTDG may be reached at benefits@opm.gov.

Within the Division for Strategic Human Resources Policy the Work Life Group is a part of the new Center for Employee and Family Support Policy. This Center, which also includes our retirement and insurance policy functions, consolidates our programs which provide direct support to Federal employees and their families, allowing the employees to concentrate on their work responsibilities and ultimately making a significant contribution to agency effectiveness.

As a part of our consolidation of our employee support policy functions, the Work Life Group will now be using the Benefits Administration Letter (BAL) system to provide up-to-date guidance and information to the agency human resource specialists working in the work life program areas. These BALs will be in the new "1000" BAL series.

BALs are published on an "as needed" basis, and are posted on the OPM web pages at http://www.opm.gov/retire/asd/htm/bal-1.asp. All BALs are distributed electronically to subscribers to the BENEFITSINFO email list. We will add current agency work life coordinators to this list. Anyone else may subscribe to the list. Information on subscribing can be found at: http://listserv.opm.gov/archives/index.html.

Download the Letter as a PDF File