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

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Compensation Conference Charts the Course for Good Management

OPM held its 2001 Strategic Compensation Conference: Charting a Successful Course for Pay, Classification, and Performance in Alexandria, Virginia, on August 28-29, 2001. The Conference provided Federal managers and human resources practitioners with updates, forecasts, and practical information on pay and leave administration, performance management, classification, and the efforts to improve the available compensation tools that support agency missions. More than 500 Federal employees from 81 agencies in 37 states and as far away as Germany attended this third annual conference. In support of the conference theme, the plenary speakers focused on a number of issues that are important for charting the course towards maintaining and improving the Government's performance.

• Keeping Our Focus on Results
• Effective Leadership
• NAPA Study
• More Information

Keeping Our Focus on Results.  OPM Director Kay Coles James led the way as the keynote speaker. She reiterated the President's directive that we should strive to create a Government that is citizen-centered, results-oriented, and market-based. In doing so, our focus should shift from personnel administration to human capital management. High performing organizations recognize that employee skills, talent, and motivation have a huge impact on results. Developing the incentives necessary to attract, reward, and retain experienced and high-performing men and women is essential to preventing further brain drain from the Federal workforce. One way to create a more results-oriented Government is by integrating employee performance management systems with agency program performance management and budgeting systems. Director James also spoke of the President's Freedom to Manage Initiative and explained how it will help agencies move forward by removing some of the barriers to efficient management. The Initiative is designed to help agencies make better use of the flexibilities currently in place to acquire and develop talent and leadership.

Effective Leadership.  Ambassador Richard Haass, Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State, spoke on "How to be an Entrepreneurial Bureaucrat." He said becoming an entrepreneurial bureaucrat requires effective leadership - being smart is not enough. Creating measures for effective leadership can be hard to do, especially when there is no bottom line. The Ambassador described several characteristics of effective leadership. Effective leaders:

• tell their bosses the truth, keep them informed, and support their decisions;
• realize that they owe their subordinates their loyalty;
• do not micromanage;
• delegate and trust their subordinates to do their jobs;
• provide their subordinates with public praise and, as necessary, private criticism;
• are able to persuade or sell an idea or cause to their colleagues and peers, and, as necessary, cooperate with them even though they may be competitors in some respects;
• realize that their customers and stakeholders are important, even though they may be the easiest to ignore;
• spend time with their customers and listen to what they have to say;
• realize that it is not enough to have a good idea -they must be able to sell that idea;
• keep their priorities limited to a few items;
• focus on being effective and on the issues that will make a real difference; and
• do not believe leadership means the boss tells sub-ordinates what to do.

NAPA Study.  Myra Howze Shiplett, Director of the Center for Human Resources Management at the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and Fred Thompson from the Federal IT (Information Technology) Workforce Committee of the Chief Information Officers Council, spoke on the results of NAPA's com-parative study of IT pay systems. The results were re-ported in NAPA's final report, The Transforming Power Of Information Technology: Making the Federal Government an Employer of Choice for IT Workers, which was published in September 2001. The NAPA report recommends spe-cific reforms to enhance the Federal Government's abil-ity to attract and retain a skilled IT workforce. The study brought together two critical issues - human capital and IT. The study team found that:

• the Government has a critical need to increase the IT workforce by 20 percent over the next 7 years to compensate for an aging workforce and the effects of IT outsourcing;
• a pay gap exists between the private and public sectors;
• the recruitment system is broken - there are long hiring delays with complicated steps in the hiring process in many agencies;
• in 2001, about 70 percent of IT dollars will be paid to contractors;
• the Government increasingly relies on outside experts to keep up with the dynamics of technology while focusing its internal resources on strategic planning, procurement, and project management; and
• IT professionals prefer compensation systems that determine pay increases primarily based on perform-ance rather than longevity.

The study provides several recommendations, including:

• establish effective pay for performance programs,
• create balanced work/life programs that meet the needs of the IT professional,
• streamline the hiring process, and
• enhance IT training and developmental opportunities.

Originally published on Fall 2001.