Strategic Objective 3: Organizational Excellence

Organizational Excellence includes the final element of the Chair's Five-Point Plan - EEOC as a Model Workplace. Our efforts seek to improve our organizational capacity and infrastructure to more effectively carry out our mission through sound management of our resources - human, financial and technological. Each of these resources are essential to achieve our enforcement and prevention goals. Balancing all three of our strategic objectives is necessary to accomplish our mission.

At the heart of our efforts to become a model workplace and achieve organizational excellence is our employees. In FY 2004, we began to implement strategies, programs and practices to strategically manage our employees and enable them to perform their jobs better - achieving the results to which we aspire and the public deserves.

In addition, this Strategic Objective reinforces our efforts to manage for results and focus on our customers, both internal and external. The PMA amplifies these tenets and provides the roadmap for the Objective. We are working diligently to meet the PMA requirements for greater organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

EEOC aims to be an organization that sets and implements the highest quality standards for equal opportunity, customer service, internal efficiencies, and fiscal responsibility. Through vision, leadership, and a culture of continuous improvement, we intend to achieve these goals and become a model for others.

Eight of our performance measures in our Strategic Plan are included under this Strategic Objective for Organizational Excellence and the Chair's Five-Point Plan for EEOC as a Model Workplace. The following table lists these measures.

A model workplace strives to provide outstanding customer service. Measure 3.1.1 will use survey techniques to measure our customers' confidence in our services. We will assess attributes and processes that impact on individuals and employers who use our services, such as staff professionalism, agency operations, and approaches to service delivery. This information will enable us to identify and focus on ways to streamline our processes and continuously improve. This measure also allows us to evaluate and improve our internal support operations. A key component that is necessary to achieve excellent external customer service is the ability of our supporting offices to provide excellent service to its "customers," our employees.

We initiated several steps in FY 2004 that will enable us to conduct surveys in FY 2005 and establish baseline values; to reach a goal we establish for FY 2009 for the percentage of customers we expect to be confident in our services; and, target values we intend to achieve in the intervening years. We believe that our steps in FY 2005 will allow us to stay within our time frame for achieving our goal for this measure.

Critical aspects for achieving our internal and external customer service goals are the ability to address our future human capital needs and to provide a good working environment for our employees. Measure 3.1.2 addresses these areas. OPM has developed guidance to help agencies evaluate their working environment and apply successful strategies to manage and develop its human capital. The two year target for FY 2004 and FY 2005 is to develop our comprehensive human capital strategy and begin to implement approaches toward achieving this goal.

With our efforts during FY 2004 , we are well on our way toward meeting the two year target for this measure. We developed a draft strategic human capital plan and began using it to chart further efforts in line with the our Strategic Plan. We established a cross-organizational working group to help design a cohesive, broad based workforce planning strategy to extend workload and staffing projections already in use and multiple approaches to implement it. A performance management system was developed and implemented to align efforts and rewards with the agency's strategic direction. Management training and development was updated and implemented. Managers also received general and tailored guidance on labor relations issues. For the two major frontline positions, investigator and trial attorney, standard position descriptions were updated, so that the specification of what these two key groups do is aligned with the EEOC's mission. Materials for assessing Investigator competencies in conjunction with our automated application system were developed. During FY 2005 and into FY 2006, we will build on this foundation for achieving our goal and begin to implement key features necessary to establish a solid foundation of policies, procedures and practices for recruiting, developing, and retaining the workforce of the future for the agency.

To complement our customer service initiative in Measure 3.1.1 and our human capital strategy in Measure 3.1.2, we need to know how our own workplace environment impacts on our employees' ability to provide excellent service. OPM is assisting all Federal agencies to survey employees on areas affecting them in the workplace. Starting in September 2004, OPM began to survey our employees. Once OPM releases the results of the survey, which is expected by the beginning of the second quarter of FY 2005, we will be able to determine which areas need our attention and how to improve employee satisfaction. Our goal for this measure by the end of FY 2009 is to meet or exceed the government-wide average from OPM surveys. Once survey results are available for EEOC and all other Federal agencies, we will be able to compare respective rates of employee satisfaction in the area of human capital and the steps needed to achieve our long-term goal.

An important component of the PMA is the ability of the Agency to manage its financial resources. Private sector employers and, for some time, major Federal agencies have been required to obtain unqualified opinions from an independent audit of their financial records. Recent statutory changes now require EEOC to have an independent audit of its annual financial statements. In FY 2003, an auditor conducted our first-ever financial audit of the agency in preparation for implementing Measure 3.1.4 in FY 2004. We corrected two material weakness raised in that audit and received the agency's first unqualified opinion from the auditor; demonstrating that we are diligently managing our financial resources. We expect to receive an unqualified audit opinion for each of the remaining years through FY 2009.

As we noted for Measure 2.1.2, Management Directive 715 describes the key attributes of a Model EEO Program for all Federal agencies. With that measure, we expect to have 50% of all Federal agencies successfully implementing the model by the end of FY 2009. EEOC is the Federal agency charged with enforcing the Nation's civil rights laws to protect individuals from employment discrimination. We are also expected to be a model workplace under the Chair's Five-Point Plan, which means that our own EEO workplace policies and practices should serve as a prototype for other Federal agencies. Measure 3.1.5 reinforces our commitment to be a model workplace in the area of equal employment opportunity for our own employees. We intend to adopt the Model EEO Program by the end of FY 2006, when we will have successfully implemented all of the attributes described in the model.

Pending the finalization of the methodology that will be used to assess an agency's EEO Program under MD 715, we used the attributes set forth in the self-assessment checklist that was provided with the instructions for the Management Directive. Our preliminary assessment reflects a 79% success rate for the attributes in the checklist, thus exceeding our goal of implementing at least 50% of the attributes of a Model EEO Program during FY 2004. Although the 79% rate exceeds our goal of 75% for FY 2005, we will not revise our FY 2005 goal until our program can be evaluated using the actual assessment tool that will be used to assess all other agencies.

One of the most important components of the Model EEO Program is the proficient resolution of our internal EEO complaints. We have made significant progress in this area. Our average processing time for internal EEO complaints declined by 8% from FY 2002 to FY 2003. However, the result was still an average processing time of 510 days, beyond what would be expected in a model program. Measure 3.1.6 establishes an ambitious target for us to reduce the processing time by at least 40% by the end of FY 2009. Using FY 2003 as a benchmark, our goal was to reduce our average processing time by 10% during FY 2004.

As a first step to meet this goal, we focused on improving complaint management to dramatically reduce the amount of time a complaint is in the investigative phase. We were able to reduce the average processing time for investigations by 40% (from 275 days to 164 days). The overall result has been a decrease in the average processing time for all types of complaints, which includes dismissals, settlements, and merit decisions with and without an administrative judge's decision. For FY 2004, the average processing time for all internal EEO complaints was reduced by 17.5% (from the 510-day average for the FY 2003 benchmark to 442 days) [10 months of data shows 15% reduction to 430 days].

We intend to reduce the amount by 20% in FY 2005, compared to the FY 2003 benchmark. We are establishing a target value for FY 2006 of 25% to reduce the average days to process our EEOC complaints, compared to the
FY 2003 benchmark. Both of the FY 2005 and FY 2006 targets are ambitious goals because, as we reduce our average time to process a case, it is harder to reduce it further, making subsequent targets harder to achieve.

The RESOLVE Program, EEOC's internal ADR program, was launched last fiscal year. The Program is another component of our efforts to become a model workplace. RESOLVE provides a forum for the informal resolution of a variety of workplace disputes involving both EEO and non-EEO concerns. Measure 3.1.7 tracks employees' willingness to participate again in RESOLVE. Our FY 2004 target for this measure is 30%. We far exceeded the target, with 94% of the individuals reporting a willingness to participate in the program again. This unexpected first year result even exceeds our long-term goal of reaching 80% by FY 2009. We recognize that there is a high level of receptivity in the first year. Our challenge, however, is to sustain the high level of performance over the next few years. We have raised our target to 90% for FY 2005 and FY 2006. We will re-evaluate our performance measure once we know our results for a longer period of time.

We are continuing to expand our electronic document management initiative. Our Document Management System (DMS) will improve overall agency internal efficiency and effectiveness by increasing access to information, promoting collaboration, streamlining work processes and reducing paperwork burden. It will also improve disaster recovery by providing the capability for electronic off-site storage and recovery of critical agency files.

The two-year target for FY 2004 and FY 2005 for this measure focuses on building the technical infrastructure required to support enterprise-wide document management; such as expanding telecommunication bandwidth, acquiring storage devices and software licenses, and preparing for the phased-in, multi-year implementation of the DMS. During FY 2004, EEOC installed the first phase of the production DMS infrastructure. In addition, we began converting our Federal appellate case files into a structured, electronic format within the DMS. In FY 2005, we will continue to expand DMS functionality and will convert the key documents in at least 3% of the active files by the end of FY 2006. The conversion process should then proceed rapidly and we anticipate meeting our overall goal by FY 2009 to convert the key documents in 95% of our active files.

This page was last modified on November 18, 2004

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