Human Capital: Key Principles for Effective Strategic Workforce Planning
Released: 2003-12-11T00:00:00

Letter

Background

Strategic human capital management is a pervasive challenge facing the federal government. In January 2001, and again in January 2003, we identified strategic human capital management as a governmentwide high- risk area after finding that the lack of attention to strategic human capital planning had created a risk to the federal government’s ability to serve the American people effectively. As our previous reports have made clear, the widespread lack of attention to strategic human capital management in the past has created a fundamental weakness in the federal government’s ability to perform its missions economically, efficiently, and effectively. In the wake of extensive downsizing during the early 1990s, done largely without sufficient consideration of the strategic consequences, agencies are experiencing significant challenges to deploying the right skills, in the right places, at the right time. Agencies are also facing a growing number of employees who are eligible for retirement and are finding it difficult to fill certain mission-critical jobs, a situation that could significantly drain agencies’ institutional knowledge. Other factors such as emerging security threats, rapidly evolving technology, and dramatic shifts in the age and composition of the overall population exacerbate the problem. Such factors increase the need for agencies to engage in strategic workforce planning to transform their workforces so that they will be effective in the 21st century.

There are a variety of models of how federal agencies can conduct workforce planning. For example, in 1999 OPM published a five-step model that suggests agencies define their strategic direction, assess their current and future workforces, and develop and implement action plans for closing identified gaps in future workforce needs. Since then, NAPA and the International Personnel Management Association (IPMA) have reported on workforce models used by federal, state, and local governments and industry, and developed their own generic models.

Comparing these models, NAPA and IPMA found that the following four steps are generally common to strategic workforce planning efforts: examining future organizational, environmental, and other issues that may affect the agency’s ability to attain its strategic goals; determining skills and competencies needed in the future workforce to meet the organization’s goals and identifying gaps in skills and competencies that an organization needs to address; selecting and implementing human capital strategies that are targeted toward addressing these gaps and issues; and evaluating the success of the human capital strategies.

However, they also reported that federal agencies often implement these steps differently and focus on a variety of issues based on their particular circumstances when preparing their strategic workforce plans. For example, faced with a long lead time to train employees hired to replace those retiring and an increasing workload, SSA focuses a large part of its workforce planning effort on estimating and managing retirements. Unlike SSA, PBGC officials faced a future workload that could rise or fall sharply. Consequently, PBGC focused its November 2002 workforce plan on identifying skills to manage the combined efforts of federal staff and contractors to address a volatile workload.

Principle 1: Involve Top Management, Employees, and Other Stakeholders in Developing, Communicating, and Implementing the Strategic Workforce Plan

Planning, developing, and implementing workforce planning strategies, such as those that involve reshaping the current workforce through early separations, managed attrition, or increased hiring, can cause significant changes in how an agency implements its policies and programs. Our work on the human capital experiences of leading organizations as well as organizations that are undergoing major mergers and transformations has identified numerous lessons that can help federal agencies successfully implement strategic workforce planning strategies.

These lessons include the following: Ensuring that top management sets the overall direction and goals of workforce planning. Top leadership that is clearly and personally involved in strategic workforce planning provides the organizational vision that is important in times of change; can help provide stability as the workforce plan is being developed and implemented; and provides a cadre of champions within the agency, including both political and career executives, to ensure that planning strategies are thoroughly implemented and sustained over time. It can also help integrate workforce planning efforts with other key management planning efforts, such as succession planning and information technology or financial management reforms, to ensure that such initiatives work together to achieve the agency’s goals. For example, we have reported that to be effective, succession planning needs the support and commitment of an organization’s top leadership. In other countries, government agencies’ top leadership (1) actively participates in the succession planning and management programs; (2) regularly uses these programs to develop, place, and promote individuals; and (3) ensures that these programs receive sufficient financial and staff resources and are maintained over time.

Involve employees and other stakeholders in developing and implementing future workforce strategies. Agency managers, supervisors, employees, and employee unions need to work together to ensure that the entire agency understands the need for and benefits of changes described in the strategic workforce plan so that the agency can develop clear and transparent policies and procedures to implement the plan’s human capital strategies. Involving employees and other stakeholders on strategic workforce planning teams can develop new synergies that identify ways to streamline processes and improve human capital strategies and help the agency recognize and deal with the potential impact that the organization’s culture—the underlying assumptions, beliefs, values, attitudes, and expectations generally shared by an organization’s members—can have on the implementation of such improvements. Changes that recognize how they may challenge the existing culture, and include appropriate steps to deal with potential problems, are more likely to succeed than strategies that do not.

Establish a communication strategy to create shared expectations, promote transparency, and report progress. A communication strategy is especially crucial in the public sector where a full range of stakeholders and interested parties are concerned not only with what human capital and programmatic results will be achieved by a plan, but also with the processes that are to be used to achieve those results. For example, if a workforce plan calls for employing strategies that have not been extensively used before, such as recruitment bonuses, employees may be concerned about whether the processes will be followed consistently and fairly. In general, communication about the goals, approach, and results of strategic workforce planning is most effective when done early, clearly, and often and is downward, upward, and lateral.

Figure 2 describes how PBGC adopted several of these lessons during its recent workforce planning efforts.

Principle 2: Determine the Critical Skills and Competencies That Will Be Needed to Achieve the Future Programmatic Results

It is essential that agencies determine the skills and competencies that are critical to successfully achieving their missions and goals. This is especially important as changes in national security, technology, budget constraints, and other factors change the environment within which federal agencies operate. For example, as discussed in our July 2003 report on the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) international cargo container programs, DHS Customs officials have developed two new programs for increasing the security of such cargo that require recruiting and training about 270 staff to work with their foreign counterparts at more than 40 international ports and international shipping companies. To fully implement the new security programs, DHS expects to recruit and train candidates with diplomatic, language, and risk assessment (targeting) skills for 2- to 3-year permanent assignments at foreign ports. We reported that because some of these ports are in countries that our government considers hardship assignments, DHS faces a daunting challenge in attracting U.S. personnel with the necessary skills for these assignments. We recommended, among other improvements, that DHS develop human capital plans that clearly describe how the cargo security programs will meet the programs’ long-term demands for skilled staff. DHS officials agreed to develop human capital plans to better ensure the programs’ long- term success.

We have reported on similar human capital challenges at other agencies. For example, in June 2003, we testified that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had failed to fill most of the new staff positions it needed to examine recent high-profile corporate failures and accounting scandals. In our June 2002 report on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), we stated that the increasing competitive nature of the natural gas and electricity markets made it critical that FERC have more staff members knowledgeable about how the energy markets work and how to regulate these markets effectively. However, FERC did not have a strategic human capital management plan to guide its efforts to transform its workforce and had not taken full advantage of the personnel flexibilities and tools available to federal agencies in addressing its human capital challenges. In April 2002, we found that the individual federal trade agencies responsible for negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing U.S. trade agreements lacked sufficient staff members with the expertise to perform the necessary economic, technical, and legal analyses for the new agreements. The agencies collectively did not have sufficient expertise to adequately complete these analyses and faced problems with recruitment and high turnover rates.

The scope of agencies’ efforts to identify the skills and competencies needed for their future workforces varies considerably, depending on the needs and interests of a particular agency. Whereas some agencies may decide to define all the skills and competencies needed to achieve their strategic goals, others may elect to focus their analysis on only those most critical to achieving their goals. The most important consideration is that the skills and competencies identified are clearly linked to the agency’s mission and long-term goals developed jointly with key congressional and other stakeholders during the strategic planning process. If an agency identifies staff needs without linking the needs to strategic goals, or if the agency has not obtained agreement from key stakeholders on the goals, the needs assessment may be incomplete and premature.

Agencies can use various approaches for making a fact-based determination of the critical human capital skills and competencies needed for the future. For example, PBGC collected qualitative information from interviews with agency executives and managers on the factors influencing the agency’s capability to acquire, develop, and retain critical skills and competencies. Another approach, used by the Department of the Army, is to collect extensive information from employee surveys on education, training, and other factors that may influence employees’ skills. Information on attrition rates and projected retirement rates, fluctuations in workload, and geographic and demographic trends can also be useful. When estimating the number of employees needed with specific skills and competencies, it is also important to consider opportunities for reshaping the workforce by reengineering current work processes, sharing work among offices within the agency and with other agencies that have similar missions, and competitive sourcing. (See fig. 3 for information on NHGRI’s approach for determining critical skills and competencies needed to achieve its strategic goals.)

Scenario planning is an approach that agencies have used to manage risks of planning for future human capital needs in a changing environment. As discussed in our April 2003 report on agencies’ efforts to integrate human capital strategies with their mission-oriented efforts, scenarios can describe different future environments that agencies may face. For example, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and during the creation and implementation of DHS, senior U.S. Coast Guard officials reexamined five long-term scenarios developed in 1999 to describe different environments that could exist in the year 2020. In 1999, these scenarios had been the basis for agency leaders and planners to create operational and human capital strategies that they thought would work well for the U.S. Coast Guard in each independent scenario. After September 11, 2001, agency officials reviewed the scenarios to determine whether additional scenarios were needed in light of the attacks and decided to (1) create new long-term scenarios to guide planning beyond 2005 and (2) generate two scenarios with an 18-month horizon to guide short-term operational and human capital planning. Similarly, to prepare its 2002 strategic workforce plan, PBGC used scenario analysis to determine how the scope and volume of its activities might change in the next 5 years. The strategic workforce plans these organizations developed identify gaps in workforce skills or competencies that they need to fill to meet the likely scenarios rather than planning to meet the needs of a single view of the future. U.S. Coast Guard and PBGC managers believe that by using multiple scenarios they gain flexibility in determining future workforce requirements.

Principle 3: Develop Strategies Tailored to Address Gaps and Human Capital Conditions in Critical Skills and Competencies That Need Attention

Our March 2002 strategic human capital model stressed the importance of agencies developing human capital strategies—the programs, policies, and processes that agencies use to build and manage their workforces—that are tailored to their unique needs. Applying this to strategic workforce planning means that agencies (1) develop hiring, training, staff development, succession planning, performance management, use of flexibilities, and other human capital strategies and tools that can be implemented with the resources that can be reasonably expected to be available and (2) consider how these strategies can be aligned to eliminate gaps and improve the contribution of critical skills and competencies that they have identified between the future and current skills and competencies needed for mission success. For example, we reported that to manage the succession of their executives and other key employees, agencies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom are implementing succession planning and management practices that protect and enhance organizational capacity. Specifically, their initiatives identify high-potential employees from multiple organizational levels early in their careers as well as identify and develop successors for employees with critical knowledge and skills. In addition, because they are facing challenges in the demographic makeup and diversity of their senior executives, agencies in other countries use succession planning and management to achieve a more diverse workforce, maintain their leadership capacity as their senior executives retire, and increase the retention of high-potential staff.

Also, in June 2003, we testified that although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has taken some steps to address short-term human capital needs related to implementing its changed priorities, as well as completing a framework for a revised strategic plan, it has not completed a strategic human capital plan. We observed that the FBI should build a more long-term approach to human capital by completing a strategic human capital plan that outlines, among other things, the results of a data- driven assessment of its needs for critical skills and competencies. Such an analysis could become the basis for FBI officials deciding how to maximize the use of available human capital flexibilities as a strategy for recruiting and retaining agents with critical skills, intelligence analysts, and other critically needed staff.

Our 2002 strategic human capital model identifies aspects of human capital management that enable agencies to maximize their employees’ contributions, such as (1) the continuing attention of senior leaders and managers to valuing and investing in their employees; (2) an investment in human capital approaches that acquires, develops, and retains the best employees; and (3) the use of performance management systems that elicit the best results-oriented performance from the staff, and indicators to measure the effectiveness of human capital approaches. Before beginning to develop specific workforce strategies, an agency can assess these aspects of its human capital approach, using OPM’s Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework, which OPM developed in conjunction with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and GAO; our model; and other tools. The results will help agencies develop a sense of the obstacles and opportunities that may occur in meeting their critical workforce needs For example, an agency that attempts to develop creative and innovative strategies will have a difficult time implementing the strategies if its assessment concludes that its overall human capital approach (1) does not effectively value people as assets whose value can be enhanced and (2) is not results oriented.

Much of the authority that agencies’ leaders need to tailor human capital strategies to their unique needs is already available under current laws and regulations. Therefore, in setting goals for its human capital program and developing the tailored workforce planning strategies to achieve these goals, it is important for agencies to identify and make use of all the appropriate administrative authorities to build and maintain the workforce needed for the future. As our December 2002 report states, this will involve agencies reexamining the flexibilities provided to them under current authorities, and identifying existing flexibilities that they could use more extensively, to develop workforce planning strategies. These flexibilities may include providing early separation and early retirement incentives authorized by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, recruitment and retention bonuses and allowances, alternative work schedules, and special hiring authorities to recruit employees with critical skills. (See fig. 4 for information on DOL’s use of flexibilities to recruit individuals with business skills.)

Principle 4: Build the Capability Needed to Address Administrative, Educational, and Other Requirements Important to Supporting Workforce Strategies

In a December 2002 report, we identified key practices that agencies need to employ to effectively take advantage of existing and new human capital authorities. Two of these practices—ensuring that the use of flexibilities is part of an overall human capital strategy and ensuring stakeholder input in developing flexibilities-related policies and procedures—are intrinsic to effective workforce planning and have already been discussed. However, as agencies plan how to implement specific workforce strategies that include flexibilities, it is important that they also consider other practices that are important to the effective use of flexibilities. These include the following: Educate managers and employees on the availability and use of flexibilities. Managers and supervisors can be more effective in using human capital strategies that involve new flexibilities, such as recruitment bonuses, if they are properly trained to identify when they can be used and how to use the agency’s processes for ensuring consistency, equity, and transparency. To avoid confusion and misunderstandings, it is also important to educate employees about how the agency uses human capital flexibilities and employee rights under policies and procedures related to human capital.

Streamline and improve administrative processes. It is important that agencies streamline administrative processes for using flexibilities and review self-imposed constraints that may be excessively process oriented. Although sufficient controls are important to ensure consistency and fairness, agency officials developing a workforce strategy that uses flexibilities should look for instances in which processes can be reengineered.

Build transparency and accountability into the system. Clear and transparent guidelines for using specific flexibilities, and holding managers and supervisors accountable for their fair and effective use, are essential to successfully implementing workforce strategies. Guidelines can be used to (1) provide well-defined and documented decision-making criteria for using flexibilities and help ensure that they are consistently applied and (2) minimize managers’ and supervisors’ potential reluctance to use flexibilities by addressing their concerns that without guidelines, employees may see them as unfairly applying the flexibilities. An agency can also use a results-oriented performance management system to reinforce managers’ accountability for implementing human capital strategies. In October 2000, OPM amended regulations to require agencies to, among other things, appraise executive performance by balancing organizational results with areas such as employee perspective. We reported on selected agencies’ implementation of a set of balanced performance expectations for senior executives and identified examples of executives’ expectations. Examples of these performance expectations were to “help attract and retain well-qualified employees” and “ensure workforce has skills aligned with the agency’s objectives.” (See fig. 5 for information on GSA Region 3’s efforts to build the capacity to support its workforce strategies.)

Principle 5: Monitor and Evaluate the Agency’s Progress toward Its Human Capital Goals and the Contribution That Human Capital Results Have Made toward Achieving Programmatic Goals

High-performing organizations recognize the fundamental importance of measuring both the outcomes of human capital strategies and how these outcomes have helped the organizations accomplish their missions and programmatic goals. Performance measures, appropriately designed, can be used to gauge two types of success: (1) progress toward reaching human capital goals and (2) the contribution of human capital activities toward achieving programmatic goals. Identifying both types of measures, and discussing how the agency will use these measures to evaluate the strategies before it starts to implement the strategies, helps agency officials think through the scope, timing, and possible barriers to evaluating the workforce plan. Periodic measurement of an agency’s progress toward human capital goals and the extent that human capital activities contributed to achieving programmatic goals provides information for effective oversight by identifying performance shortfalls and appropriate corrective actions.

For example, a workforce plan can include measures that indicate whether the agency executed its hiring, training, or retention strategies as intended and achieved the goals for these strategies, and how these initiatives changed the workforce’s skills and competencies. It can also include additional measures that address whether the agency achieved its program goals and the link between human capital and program results. An agency’s evaluation of its progress implementing human capital strategies would use the first set of measures to determine if the agency met its human capital goals and identify the reasons for any shortfalls, such as whether the agency’s implementation plan adequately considered possible barriers to achieving the goals, established effective checkpoints to allow necessary adjustments to the strategy, and assigned people with sufficient authority and resources. Further evaluation may determine that although the agency achieved its workforce goals, its human capital efforts neither significantly helped nor hindered the agency from reaching its programmatic goals. This could occur if an agency misjudged the relationship between human capital and programmatic goals when developing workforce plans and consequently has mistakenly estimated the magnitude of changes in human capital strategies that were needed to achieve program goals. These results could lead to the agency revising its human capital goals to better reflect their relationship to programmatic goals, redesigning programmatic strategies, and possibly shifting resources among human capital initiatives during the next planning cycle.

Developing meaningful outcome-oriented performance goals and collecting performance data to measure achievement of these goals is a major challenge for many federal agencies. Performance measurement tends to focus on regularly collected data available on direct products and services provided by a program, such as the number of staff trained to carry out an activity. In cases where outcomes are not quickly achieved or readily observed, such as assessing the impact a training program has on achieving an agency’s goals, performance measurement is more complex.

Federal agencies in general have experienced difficulties in defining practical and meaningful measures that assess the impact human capital strategies have on programmatic results. For example, in its fiscal year 2003 performance plan, the Federal Emergency Management Agency identified goals of streamlining its organization and developing its workforce, but listed no measures to gauge progress for either goal. In contrast, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) fiscal year 2003 performance plan includes measures of the agency’s efforts to achieve activity-oriented human capital goals, such as implementing a workforce planning model at five offices by the end of the year and completing a comprehensive pay review. These performance measures provide a base upon which EPA can seek to gauge how well its human capital efforts help the agency to achieve its programmatic goals.

The challenge faced by EPA and other agencies in using such measures is that there is not always a clear link between specific human capital strategies and strategic programmatic outcomes. This is partly because there may be multiple causes of a specific outcome, only one of which is related to a targeted human capital strategy, and unforeseen circumstances that affect implementation of a strategy. Our recent testimony on human capital challenges at the SEC and key trade agencies illustrates the practical difficulties that agencies may encounter. We testified that during 2001, U.S. trade agencies increased staff levels to address insufficient monitoring and enforcement of trade agreements. However, we noted that measuring the effectiveness of this strategy might be difficult because the agencies’ workloads in other areas continue to grow, which could cause them to shift resources intended for trade compliance to other program areas. If shifts in resources occur, the agencies may not be able to improve the effectiveness of trade compliance efforts, even though the human capital strategy initially succeeded in acquiring additional resources.

OPM’s Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework, developed in conjunction with OMB and GAO, presents consolidated guidance on standards for success and performance indicators that agencies can refer to as they transform their strategic human capital management programs. For example, it includes such strategic workforce planning indicators as whether agencies use best practices to determine workloads and resource needs and have documented strategies for workforce planning that define roles, responsibilities, and other requirements of the strategies. As we stated in January 2003, the framework represents a promising step that can improve agencies’ human capital systems. Agencies can use its indicators as a basis for developing, implementing, and evaluating their workforce planning processes. Generally, agencies will need more specific indicators to measure the success of their workforce plans. (See fig. 6 for information on SSA’s evaluation of retirement-related workforce strategies.)

Concluding Observations

There is an increasing awareness that federal agencies need to transform themselves into more efficient, results-oriented organizations if they are to meet the many fiscal, management, and policy challenges of the 21st century. To meet these challenges, federal managers will need to direct considerable time, energy, and targeted investments toward efforts that make the best use of the government’s most important resource—the people that agencies employ now and in the future. They will also need effective strategic workforce planning to identify and focus these investments on the long-term human capital issues that most affect their ability to attain mission results. The principles presented here can enhance the effectiveness of an agency’s strategic workforce planning by helping the agency focus on the issues it needs to address, the information it needs to consider, and the lessons that it can learn from other organizations’ experiences. By doing so, agencies can better ensure that their strategic workforce planning processes appropriately address the human capital challenges of the future and better contribute to the agencies’ major efforts to meet their missions and goals.

Agency Comments

We provided a draft of this report to the Secretary of Labor, the Executive Director of PBGC, the Director of NIH, the Administrator of GSA, and the Commissioner of SSA. Each of these organizations provided comments on the draft report and agreed with the information presented. DOL’s Director of Workforce Planning and Diversity; PBGC’s Chief Human Capital Officer; and GSA’s Program Management Officer, Office of the Chief People Officer, also provided written technical comments to clarify specific points regarding the information presented. Where appropriate, we have made changes to reflect those technical comments. NIH and SSA officials did not provide technical comments.

In addition to technical comments, GSA noted that while the report presents a case study on workforce planning efforts of one region, GSA has used and continues to use a robust agencywide workforce planning process. We have clarified the report to recognize that our example is limited to the activities of one GSA region and does not address the agency’s overall workforce planning efforts.

We are sending copies of this report to other interested congressional parties, the Director of OPM, the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and the Executive Director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. In addition, we will make copies available to others upon request. The report will also be available at no charge on the GAO Web site at http://www.gao.gov.

If you have any questions about this report, please contact me or William Doherty on (202) 512-6806. Others who contributed to this report were Bob Lilly, Adam Hoffman, Andrew Edelson, and Candyce Mitchell.

Scope and Methodology

To identify strategic workforce planning principles and illustrative agency examples, we gathered and analyzed information from a variety of sources. We reviewed our own guidance, reports, and testimonies on federal agencies’ workforce planning and human capital management efforts, and guidance available through the Internet and leading human capital periodicals, such as the Workforce Planning Resource Guide for Public Sector Human Resource Professionals issued by the International Personnel Management Association. We also met with officials from organizations with governmentwide responsibilities for or expertise in workforce planning, such as the Office of Personnel Management and the National Academy of Public Administration, to identify additional guidance available and to obtain their recommendations of federal agencies engaged in effective workforce planning. We synthesized information from these meetings, reports, and guidance documents and our own experiences in human capital management to (1) derive five principles that appeared most important to effective strategic workforce planning and (2) identify agencies we would contact for examples of workforce planning that illustrated these principles.

We then selected five examples of agencies’ workforce planning activities (one example corresponding to each of the five workforce planning principles) to present in the report. We met with human capital and program officials and analyzed documents related to these examples to more fully understand the specific workforce planning issues associated with the examples and how the agencies addressed these issues.

We selected the examples that in our judgment collectively illustrated these principles across a diverse set of federal programs. Because our review objectives did not include evaluating the effectiveness of agencies' workforce planning processes, we did not evaluate these processes nor did we require the presence of evaluations or other evidence demonstrating planning effectiveness as a criterion for selecting examples. We did exclude from consideration, however, processes that agencies were just beginning or that were not complete enough for agencies to be willing to present them as successful planning efforts.

The fact that an agency is profiled to illustrate the principles of a particular planning step is not meant to imply complete success for addressing the matter or lack of success for addressing other aspects of workforce planning. Furthermore, the efforts in the examples do not represent all the potential ways that an agency can implement workforce planning or address the specific human capital issue being discussed.

We conducted our work in Washington, D.C., from March 2002 through October 2003, in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.

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