Talent Management should be woven into and throughout all strategic and business plans. It is supported by Human Resources, not owned by Human Resources. The presence of an integrated strategy and strategic partnerships throughout the Agency is the key to talent management.
What Does This Mean To You As A Senior Leader?
The agency's talent management strategy is an integral part of the agency's business strategy, which supports the strategic plans and priority goals.
You must think beyond attracting talent. Your talent management strategy must include succession planning, assessments, development, retention, and knowledge sharing. These functional processes must be planned and executed as part of an integrated talent management strategy. Another important issue is how will you create a more flexible and agile organization that responds and adapts to change.
Actions/Decisions For Senior Leaders
Is my workforce performing optimally? Are we achieving goals and objectives? If not, why? Can we attribute organizational performance to attrition and/or retirements? Does my agency have an overarching workforce strategy?
How can I utilize the talent I have to gain efficiencies of operation?
How can I support talent mobility, the ability to move employees within an organization across functions and roles, across lines of business?
How is employee morale overall at the agency and within my organization? Can we sustain and enhance it through the demands of the next 24 months? How can I mitigate any negative impact?
Are we continuously monitoring employee development and progress to ensure that our workforce is able to address future changes?
Are we continuously keeping abreast of current workforce talent management strategies that we can integrate into our business processes in light of fiscal restraints (e.g., crowdsourcing, hiring recent graduates using Student Pathways, or individuals with disabilities using the Schedule A hiring authority, and Veterans)?
What do the retirement and turnover trends reveal? How can we leverage this information to build a comprehensive process to transfer knowledge from experts to entry and mid-career professionals?
What are the results from my organization's Employee View Point Survey (EVS)? Are we addressing challenges/issues identified by employees? Are we communicating actions taken to employees?
Plan
- Plan for the unexpected. Does your Agency anticipate a new strategic goal that will require an influx of resources and capabilities? Are there environmental factors that will impact your workforce that may require you to downsize or train existing employees?
- Identify Agency-level vacant and/or potential shortfall positions. What skill sets are critical to accomplishing your mission? Which positions and competencies are essential to accomplishing the mission with significantly limited resources?
- Make a plan to address competency and skills gaps, and whether your agency could train and develop current employees, hire employees with specific desired strengths, or a combination of these approaches. Processes can include leveraging employees' knowledge to train their colleagues and/or using skills from across the government and within your agency (e.g., rotations and agency skills banks).
- Evaluate agency recruiting goals. This is more than a total number of FTEs. Are you looking to bolster a particular functional area, or do you need to increase staff resources across the board? Take the time to align your recruitment, development, and retention priorities to the specific skill sets and expertise that will ultimately fulfill your strategic goals and priorities.
- Instill agility into the broader workforce. By promoting talent mobility, which refers to the ability to move employees within an organization across functions and roles, and across lines of business or business units. Talent mobility allows greater organizational agility by quickly filling near-term talent needs as well as developing talent to fill critical job roles longer-term.
- Plan for managers' time spent on talent management. Senior leaders have an important role not only in driving strategic priorities, but also in supporting managers' ability to devote time to talent management functions.
- Design a strategy and methodology for collecting, transferring, and managing knowledge. Too often, organizations are not aware of gaps in knowledge management processes until the need for knowledge transfer is urgent (e.g., a critical staff member's impending retirement). As a best practice, think about knowledge management throughout the life cycle of a project or initiative—not just at the end.
Implement
- Oversee recruiting initiatives by determining specific targets and milestones to ensure successful completion of recruiting goals.
- Support a robust on-boarding and orientation program for new employees. The on-boarding model should include ongoing feedback, development, and acculturation.
- Include talent management as a standing agenda item for your staff meetings. Talent management initiatives should not take place in a vacuum; rather, they are integrated into other programmatic initiatives. Incorporating talent management into each staff meeting helps to maintain this connection.
- Empower managers by providing them with information regarding the various recruitment, assessment, employee development, and retention strategies.
- Demonstrate the value of learning and development by providing time, support, and resources for employees and managers to participate in these activities. Actively engage in building a strong pipeline and a diverse pipeline of future leaders.
- Communicate your organization's commitment to its employees. This can be in the form of videos, emails, or handwritten notes.
Evaluate
- Determine metrics with meaningful targets and track progress in meeting goals. Align metrics with government-wide performance measures such as GPRAMA and HRstat metrics. Track quarterly reporting requirements through OMB and performance.gov (i.e., manager and applicant satisfaction measures, time to hire, hiring reform progress).
- Review accountability for metrics. Senior leaders are responsible for holding supervisors and managers accountable for achieving talent management metrics. They help colleagues maintain a clear understanding of the strategic alignment between Administrative goals, Agency strategic objectives, and performance goals.
- Ensure competency and skills gap analyses are performed. Assess skill and competency gaps on a regular basis. This insight into your employee's abilities will enable you to provide developmental interventions that will enable you to develop a workforce with up-to-date skills and abilities.
- Ensure the right skills are available when the organization needs them, along with the ability to retain them. Are the right skills available when and where the organization needs them? Did new hire placement result in measurable progress toward strategic objectives? Are resources appropriately allotted for recruitment, onboarding, and development?
- New Hire Survey
- CHCO Managers' Satisfaction Surveys and Applicant Satisfaction Surveys
- Employee Viewpoint Survey
- One- and two-year retention data
- Exit surveys where applicable/available
- Evaluate the accuracy of your position descriptions in relation to the effectiveness of your assessment tools. Ensure position descriptions accurately reflect what employees are doing.
Back to top
What Is Available To Help Facilitate Leadership In The Completion Of These Activities And Decisions?
There are a variety of items available to help facilitate leadership in the completion of human capital decisions and activities.
Agency Strategic Plan
The Strategic Plan presents the long-term objectives an agency hopes to accomplish, set at the beginning of each new term of an Administration. It describes general and longer-term goals the agency aims to achieve, what actions the agency will take to realize those goals and how the agency will deal with the challenges likely to be barriers to achieving the desired result. An agency's Strategic Plan should provide the context for decisions about performance goals, priorities, and budget planning, and should provide the framework for the detail provided in agency annual plans and reports.
Agency Annual Performance Plans (APP)
Under the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act (GPRAMA), an agency's APP defines the level of performance to be achieved during the year in which the plan is submitted and the next fiscal year.
Agency Annual Performance Reports (APR)
The APR provides information on the agency's progress in achieving the goals and objectives described in the agency's Strategic Plan and Annual Performance Plan, including progress on the Agency Priority Goals. The term APR refers to the same content as in the performance section of the Performance and Accountability Report (PAR) published by agencies in November, or the Annual Performance Report that is published by agencies in February.
Succession Management Plans
The document used to communicate initiatives, programs, and activities associated with the succession management strategy. The Plan is intended to obtain buy-in and support, articulate expectations, and ensure policies and practices are modified, when necessary, to support succession management efforts. The succession management plan must include the strategies to meet succession targets, an implementation plan, and an evaluation accountability plan.
Past Hiring Trends
Reviewing past hiring trends can reveal a host of critical decision making actions and activities. Past hiring data can uncover useful information about successful recruitment strategies and emerging hiring needs.
Competency and Skills Gap Analysis
Critical workforce-planning exercise used to identify difference between competencies and skills needed and competencies and skills possessed by employees in mission-critical and non-mission critical occupations.
Managers' Satisfaction Survey Results
A useful way to capture, measure, and understand the hiring manager's satisfaction levels with the hiring process. The agency's CHCO can use the survey data to design strategies that improve and strengthen the relationship between the human resource office and the hiring managers.
Applicant Satisfaction Survey Results
A useful way to capture, measure, and understand the applicant's satisfaction levels with the application and hiring process. The agency's CHCO can use the survey data to design strategies that improve the application and hiring process.
Exit Survey Results
Exit surveys are a great way to identify and understand trends associated with the reasons that employees leave a particular organization. Information from the exit surveys can be used to improve an agency's recruitment, hiring, and retention strategies. The surveys should become a regular and recurring part of the process as employees transition out of the agency or retire from Federal service.
New Hire Survey Results
New hire surveys should be given to employees during their first 90 days of employment. This survey provides valuable data on the employee's acculturation and engagement in their new role. This satisfaction directly contributes to an agency's retention rates.
Back to top