A Conversation with ... Michael Beaupre
 
  By DLA Public Affairs
  **Can you give us an overview of what DLA Human Resources Services does and how it aligns with DLA Human Resources?**
Sure, I know the different terms sound similar and can get confusing. In a nutshell, DHRS is the operational arm of DLA Human Resources. DHRS falls under DLA Human Resources and is by far its largest organization. We provide the actual HR services — benefits and retirement processing, employee relations, promotions, reassignments, hiring actions, etc. — for DLA’s 25,000 federal civilians. We also provide personnel services for the agency’s more than 500 active military personnel. And many people don’t know we also provide staffing and benefits support, among other services, to roughly 45,000 employees of other Defense Department agencies on a fee-for-service basis. 
The other DLA Human Resources teams — Policy, Labor and Employee Relations Policy; Human Capital Program Development; and Human Capital Business Integration — deal more with the “big picture”-type stuff, such as policy guidance, workforce planning, strategic planning internal controls, and audit support. We all work closely together on our shared goal of making DLA the best-managed organization in the federal workforce. **Providing HR support to 45,000 DoD employees outside DLA sounds like a huge job. Can you tell us more about how that came about and how it works?**
Our mission to provide HR support to other DoD agencies stemmed from the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure legislation, which called for consolidation of HR assets in the defense agencies. Our DoD Customers team has been fully operational since 2011 and operates like a business, with operating funds coming from customer payments for services rendered. 
Dedicated personnel work with agencies — including the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff, DoD Education Agency, Missile Defense Agency, Defense Media Activity, Defense Commissary Agency and Defense Threat Reduction Agency — to customize support to fit those agencies’ needs. Formal military service-level agreements with agencies outline specific support that could encompass everything from staffing, in-processing, personnel actions processing, and managing benefits and retirement actions.
Fewer than 300 people make up this team, but they’ve saved our customers tens of millions of dollars. We already provide workers’ compensation management, drug-testing management, and audit support to some customers, and we hope to soon be able to provide our customer agencies access to our electronic Learning Management System to deliver training and track completions.**What are some of the greatest challenges facing DHRS?**
As is often the case, things outside our control can pose the greatest challenges. But we’re lucky to have forward-thinking leadership in DLA Human Resources and staff members adept at brainstorming effective solutions. The recent example that immediately comes to mind is the temporary hiring freeze enacted in January this year. We couldn’t effect an earlier end to the hiring freeze, but we took several concrete steps to help DLA recover from the hardships imposed by the hiring freeze once it was lifted in early May. 
Throughout the freeze, we worked closely with all of our customers to prioritize critical hiring actions and request waivers from DoD when appropriate. We also carefully prioritized actions to take after the freeze ended. We began by immediately assigning start dates for those new hires who had already completed all the necessary steps and accepted tentative offers before the freeze took effect. Then we moved on to issuing tentative offers in cases where the hiring manager had previously made a selection. 
Simultaneously, we worked with hiring managers with valid vacancies to expedite finalizing position descriptions and job announcements. Two weeks after the hiring freeze was officially lifted, DHRS had cleared a full 75 percent of the staffing backlog that had accrued over three months — something we’re pretty proud of! 
Similarly, last year we were dealing with mandatory personnel cuts to major headquarters activities and DoD’s “delayering” initiative. But here in DLA, where we have engaged leadership and a quality workforce, we prefer to look at these issues as opportunities to clarify our mission priorities and renew our focus on culture and accountability. **Over the past year, the implementation of the DoD Performance Management and Appraisal Program was a major HR focus for the whole workforce. What role did DHRS play in that implementation?**
DPMAP is obviously a really big deal in the DoD. In all, roughly 630,000 employees will be covered by the program when it’s fully launched throughout the department, including nearly all DLA civilian employees. DHRS was responsible for several significant aspects of implementing DPMAP in DLA. I’ll run through them one at a time.
Training: DoD mandated all affected personnel be trained on the program prior to implementation. DLA Training tailored the DoD curriculum materials to the DLA workforce, then offered that curriculum in two phases: an hourlong computer-based course that was delivered through our LMS, and an eight-hour classroom course delivered in person to the extent possible. We knew early on we wouldn’t be able to deliver this training to the entire workforce with existing personnel, so our training team developed an innovative solution: training facilitators provided by DLA organizations who were certified as subject-matter experts by DLA Training to deliver this classroom curriculum in their respective locations. This worked even better than we imagined. Over just five months, 26 instructors from DLA Training and 105 facilitators from other DLA organizations delivered in-person training to more than 24,000 DLA team members throughout the United States and in roughly 20 other countries. 
MyPerformance: Civilian employees and their supervisors manage all steps of the performance management process — creating performance plans, tracking performance discussions and accomplishments, and writing and receiving appraisals — in an automated system called MyPerformance. The DHRS information technology systems team worked closely with DLA Information Operations and DoD personnel officials to test and troubleshoot implementation and ensure all DLA employees and supervisors had access to the system. They also set up a mailbox to answer employee questions about using this entirely new HR system. 
Customer Account Managers: In DLA, DHRS customer account managers are assigned to all DLA field activities and headquarters organizations as our face to the customer. CAMs interact daily with their serviced organizations’ leaders by participating in daily standup meetings, staff meetings and larger venues such as town halls. They are integrated into the organizations to provide advice and support from the initial stages of any workforce issues. When it came to DPMAP, they were instrumental in socializing up-front issues that were brought up and in communicating every phase of the implementation (e.g., training, systems, performance plans, etc.).**How does DHRS help support the 21st century workforce?**
We continually work to keep up with trends in technology, in terms of delivering training, electronic HR systems, and data aggregation and security. It’s a challenging field, and the teams we have working in these areas are top notch! We’ve worked for years to deliver training via blended technologies. Why send people on expensive temporary duty for training when we can deliver content via computer online, via tablet or via video teleconference? Delivering training electronically has the added benefit of being environmentally responsible by reducing our use of paper and ink, and we can make updates to content instantly. 
Our next major IT project is migrating our electronic Learning Management System for assigning, delivering and tracking training to a cloud-based environment, which will make the system less costly and allow faster updates. DLA employees register nearly 600,000 training completions in topics such as IT, logistics, project management, safety and other business-related topics each year. Much of DLA’s leadership training, which is aligned with the Office of Personnel Management’s executive core competencies, is also delivered through the LMS.**We’ve mostly discussed DHRS’s role in managing and supporting DLA’s civilian workforce, but the agency also has over 500 assigned military personnel. What is your organization’s role in supporting DLA service members?**
DLA Military Personnel administers the full range of military human resources programs to support the readiness, mission and well-being of DLA service members around the world. This team of both military and civilian personnel ensures DLA follows applicable service and DoD guidelines and standardizes procedures across DLA. It also manages military training, access to service data systems and assignments.
Managing military assignments in a joint agency brings with it specific challenges, which our DHRS military team members are especially adept at overcoming. They must start planning for a replacement a full year before the expected departure of a military member assigned to DLA to make sure the military services are aware of our upcoming requirements. As a joint agency, DLA gets notification of an incoming military member, and then leaders in the specific DLA organization with the vacancy review the individual’s records and concur or non-concur with the assignment. While rare, managing non-concurrences and negotiating with DLA field activities and the military services for assignment of replacement personnel can be a sensitive issue and takes careful oversight. DLA leaders rely on our DHRS Military Personnel team to handle this and other aspects of HR management and support to the agency’s uniformed team members. **What else does DHRS manage that we haven’t discussed yet?**
DLA Human Resources follows a “Hire to Retire” business model, known as H2R, in which we support our team members from the hiring process, training and internships, all the way through career and leader development and retirement planning. We had come to realize that payroll services and travel management were an integral part of this H2R function, so in June 2017 a team of 43 employees was transferred from DLA Finance to DLA Human Resources to provide better coordination of critical functions, improve audit support and minimize financial risk. 
Part of helping DLA employees remain productive and resilient is making sure their benefits elections are up-to-date and that they understand what benefits they’re entitled to. Earlier this year, the DLA Benefits Center undertook an extensive reorganization to better meet the needs of our valuable customers. Dedicated phone numbers now provide a direct line of communication to a DLA benefits specialist to help answer questions and resolve issues pertaining to retirement and phased retirement, medical or life insurance, the Thrift Savings Plan, and flexible spending accounts. This highly trained staff processed more than 3,000 benefits actions, which they tracked in a state-of-the-art Web-based system, in one six-month period in the past year. 
DLA has a strong reputation as an employer of choice within the federal government. Over time, our directors have placed a high priority on programs to support our workforce in a variety of ways, and DHRS administers and oversees several of these programs. The Employee Assistance Program, Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program, the DLA awards program, and the workers’ compensation program all fall under the purview of DHRS. Dedicated teams support each of these important programs that go a long way in helping meet the DLA Strategic Plan goal of maintaining a workforce that is valued and resilient.