foreign [Music] welcome to powering PMA goals Workforce sponsored by servicenow I'm Mimi gergis with the government matters thought leadership Network when you think of your dream job is it in government President Biden's management agenda aims to make every federal job a good job it emphasizes employee engagement at a critical time when Americans are interacting with the government in new ways it challenges agency leaders to think differently about recruiting and retention to look beyond the numbers and build a Workforce that reflects the population it serves in this program we explore the challenges and opportunities to transform the federal Workforce and meet or exceed PMA Workforce goals joining me now is retired General Larry Spencer he's former Vice chief of staff for the U.S Air Force General welcome to the program thank you for having me it's a pleasure to be here what would you say are the most pressing civilian Workforce issues facing the defense department and and how would you prioritize it yeah there are several I think uh overall I would characterize it as culture I think the civilian culture is one that is not viewed very positively sometimes about folks outside the government I think that's a real shame uh I think it's uh it's unfortunate uh but I think culture the civilian Workforce and the dod really needs to understand how important they are how value they are uh so we can so they can feel good about what they do every day I would prioritize that number one number two I would say training uh if you think about it uh there are 1.3 million folks in uniform there are 800 000 reserves and then there are 750 000 civilians so roughly a third of our fighting force is civilian a lot of people don't realize that but think about this though of that 750 000 only 500 will graduate from training programs in any given year less than 20 will be involved in programs like exchange with with civilian industry so there needs to be a lot more training uh in addition to the culture and then finally uh I would say there needs to be a lot of more upskilling reskilling so that when our civilians come in they don't just come in for one job they think about the future and I think DOD could do a lot better job at preparing our civilians that come into civil service for those jobs of the future not just the job they have today and how would you say uh dod's approach to civilian talent management is different from the private sector or even from other federal agencies sure I I think the biggest difference from industry is industry tends to hire a person not just for a job today but they're thinking about five years from now 10 years from now so they're really looking for in addition to the current skills of their job they're looking for a baseline of skills so that person can move up in the company in the future uh DOD Civil Service structure not so much if there's a gs11 gs12 gs13 they tend to hire for that position uh the question is okay but what happens five years from now technology has changed the world has changed but you've got that person that you hired five years ago who may not be prepared for the future so I think that's the largest difference future looking versus sort of present looking so I how do you make that shift though from that kind of the short term hiring that we we've got now to more of a longer term and not just looking at the current position that you're hiring sure enough one I think we have to so let me give an example um you can literally join civil service and because I saw my whole career gs11 gs12 in a job and you can stay in that job for 30 30 plus years in the same job same location uh in civilian industry they won't allow that uh not because of the individual but because of the future of the company and for the profitability of the company and so rather than have those folks just sit in those jobs and then DOD will go out and hire other folks they take those folks they already have and move them up through the company so I think DOD has no choice in my opinion going forward than to stop looking at or sort of abandon this this notion of we're hiring one person for one job where rather we are hiring a person who has the requisite skills to make our company successful to make DOD successful in the future and what would you say as far as data goes what data is available to make better decisions when it comes to the civilian Workforce how do you use that data in a better way a great question because one of the things I think that's really lacking is a good data system so let me give an example uh if DOD today wanted to know how many employees do we have that have artificial intelligence experience how many employees do we have that have Hypersonic experience they can't do that today and so we we have to have systems that have the data in them stored in them so we know what we have rather than go out and hire someone we need to first know what do we already what you know the folks that we've already bought into the system what skills do they have particularly as you think about us going forward and so the systems that we have now are really lacking uh they're outdated and need to be updated pretty and upgraded rather pretty pretty pretty seriously you know it currently takes on average about 120 days to bring somebody on and I see your your reaction what needs to be done to cut that number down first of all unacceptable uh so what's happening today is Young Folks or or don't have to be young but in particularly Young Folks well interview for a job and and not only are they interviewing for jobs in the Department of Defense but they're interviewing for jobs all across industry in our country and in Industry generally particularly after an interview it takes 48 hours or so to get back with an offer 120 days later when DOD calls it's too late they've been working for four months already for another company um so that is completely unacceptable dod you know there's a lot of excuses I think that are used like well they have to go to security clearance well there are ways of getting around that you know you can hire folks in with temporary clearance so there's a lot of things I think we use uh we just kind of call it bureaucracy that we just need to cut through and just stop and so DOD is not like civilian industry but in this case uh they certainly need to learn from industry can you point to any successes that you think the the dod has had that can be replicated uh across the government absolutely so I'll give you an example I'm really excited about what the new space force is doing uh they sort of started with a clean sheet so they're doing a lot of things that are Innovative in terms of talent management back to the example I use with industry they literally today in space force when they hire someone they hire them with a requisite Baseline of space skills so it could be a job for HR a job for finance an operational job but they they are still looking for a baseline of space expertise so they bring them in and then they give them a lot of training and a lot of mentorship so they bring them up through the system uh space force is also doing a really good job trying to increase their diversity because right now the space force is not very diverse but they are specifically going out to hbcus and other venues to try to bring more diversity into space force so my experience in looking at DOD and looking at Industries space force I'm really proud of them because they really don't a good job you know General DOD is obviously on The Cutting Edge of the most advanced technology available in the world but on the I.T level there's a lot of frustration do you think that's impacting the ability to recruit and retain workers I think so because again I can tell you from my experience in Industry I.T drives most businesses I mean you know just using a simple example any of us that walk into work on any given day if we just told we're just told our email is down we throw our hands and say and say oh my God I can't work today um and so you I T must be an integral part of the operations not an a support agency sitting on the side waiting for my computer to break they have to be integrated and I think a lot of folks are frustrated sometimes that they're not because they feel like they're they're the computer folks and not really involved in the the operation which is I think where do i t support should be you said earlier about you know kind of the difference between how dod looks at the Uniform service as opposed to the civilian service what are those resources what needs to be done on the civilian side to better match those sure huge gaps between the amount of resources put on Military folks as as a compared to civilian huge gaps that needs to change again 1.3 billion uniform 800 000 Reserve 750 000 civilians their their third leg in the stool so we have to reprioritize and readjust the resources that we put into put into our civilian Workforce because they are critical to our warfighting capability all right well General Spencer so nice to talk to you thank you so much thank you so much for having me I appreciate it later in the program we'll talk to a panel of Chief human capital officers from three agencies but first we'll get an industry perspective on tools and practices to transform the federal Workforce stay with us [Music] powering PMA goals Workforce is sponsored by servicenow learn more at servicenow.com gov [Music] later in the program we'll talk to a panel of Chief human capital officers from three agencies but first we'll get an industry perspective on tools and practices to transform the federal Workforce joining me now is Kevin Brooks he's servicenow's digital strategist Kevin welcome to the program thanks for having me I appreciate it you know what Kevin I want to kind of take a step back and ask why the focus on the federal Workforce what ultimate impact does Workforce issues have on the health of the United States well Workforce is the backbone of federal government if you go back to any period in our history Federal Workforce has been the key to success for this nation right now we are reassessing the fact that we're at a near peer conflict and the federal Workforce is going to be moving us forward for a whole of government approach if you think about just Innovation Innovation is the key for free people to overcome authoritarian regimes our folks are afraid to to to be to fail and you have to be able to fail to succeed whereas in other nations they may have more numbers than us they may have more toys than us but they're also for working because they're being told to not because they want to you know one of the most urgent issues facing the federal Workforce is generational there are not enough young people coming in to replace older workers who are retiring or just resigning what's the solution uh then we have to be a total approach for the industry and government work together you can't outspend industry let's just be real about that the government has to find a way to make work that is valuable and uh honorable Elevate that to a level where people want to do it the mission is the calling for a federal Workforce so giving them better tools having a better uh experience when you come to work and offering them a better quality of life while they're at work are three of the keys I think to getting younger folks to actually pay attention and say hey this government gig might not be bad you know work-life balance of course is a big issue across all sectors where do you think the federal civilian Workforce is on that issue and what are ways for them to have a better experience so their desires are locked step with those of the civilian cat they're Professor counterparts they want a better work-life balance where they are realistically it's probably off the filter a little bit off center so they don't have the tools they need one to do their job effectively so they're probably putting in more hours they need to on things that they don't need to be working on it's the it's the mundane things that are dragging their work work the work life down what you want to do is give them the ability to do those things that are hard and get rid of those complex things and then you're able to have a better life balance with regards to um how you feel about your work it's it's a feeling it's not necessarily A you know a doing well let's talk a little bit specifically about that about you know the Innovation and the tools that are out there that would allow federal employees to have that better work-like balance and to innovate at scale okay so you need what I would say is you need three things you need a system that allows you to work so action you need a system that allows you to engage engagement and then Insight so tool number one is how do you do your work from a remote environment a hybrid environment or even in your office is your computer boot up quickly can you log on from wherever you need to log on and do the things you need to do easily that's that's the first and the easiest thing to do number two can I get the help I need if I need to solve a problem for myself can I do self-service through HR or it or Finance because those things take a lot of time and distract me from my work or from my private life and finally do I know what I should be doing so do I have the data and the ability to analyze what my work really is impact acting Kevin what is Talent mapping and how does artificial intelligence play into that okay so Talent mapping is where you use you use the data you already have on individual and maybe some questionnaires to get a little bit more Rich data behind them um outside of what their work skills are so as an example I might say Hey Mimi tell me what your interests are what are your hobbies you know what's your favorite color I put that into into a profile and I use that profile to figure out what are your attributes versus your skills what are the things you might be able to do well if I gave you the right training and the ability long term AI allows us to then take similar people who have similar backgrounds and similar attributes and measure them against how they've performed in certain jobs to see if a certain profile maps to a certain position and you know one criticism and you kind of alluded to this where you know American workers aren't um aren't afraid to fail but a criticism is that they are disincentivized from risk taking if you fail you get blamed if you don't try nobody blames you so what's the solution there I think we have to figure out a way to measure good failure so they're measured and calculated risks are always a part of what we've done as Americans and I'll go back to my Innovation at the beginning of the conversation you think about the movie hidden figures and the mathematicians who are trying to figure out how to get a man on the moon they did a lot of calculations some of them were wrong they knew at the end they had to keep doing that math until they got it right and they were incentivized to keep doing the math because they knew the end goal so if we tied those Mission those those elements of success and failure to the actual ultimate Mission success I think you can measure that much better did I fail in a good way I fail forward or did I fail by an error of omission versus commission you've got to find a way to measure that and then I think once you're able to measure that then you can start allowing your Workforce to be much more free because I do agree it's a problem and you know you spent 26 years in public service and you're on the industry side now so I wonder from your perspective what best practices have you seen in Industry that will work in the federal space and um you know specifically around this idea of talent management what have you seen okay number one is you got to start right the onboarding and off-boarding that the federal government provides to their employees is behind times my own personal story when I left Federal service and came into private sector uh the higher to onboard cycle was 30 days from my first interview to the time I actually started working 30 days I had a laptop I had system access I had everything I needed on Day Zero and so day one I was a full-up round ready to work we don't do that in the federal government as general Spencer alluded to it's 120 days to get someone on board that's a long time and that's just when they get in the door that's not talking about system access and all the other things that go into getting someone ready to work number two I think it's then a mentoring program how do you Mentor how do you build map a career going back to Career mapping it's also do you have a path what's my path how am I going to succeed when's the next level time that I could level up and what does that look like and then lastly it's going back to we have to do better at making sure they're customer Centric whatever your customer is in the federal workspace it's the U.S citizenry they've got to have a just a completely customer Centric Focus all right Kevin thanks so much for being on the program thank you man appreciate it coming up next we'll talk to a panel of Chief human capital officers from three agencies about best practices and using new tools to improve recruiting retention and training we'll be right back [Music] powering PMA goals Workforce is sponsored by servicenow learn more at servicenow.com gov coming up next we'll talk to a panel of Chief human capital officers from three agencies about best practices and using new tools to improve recruiting retention and training joining me now are three Chief human capital officers Catherine Emerson is with the Department of Justice Elias Hernandez is at the small business administration and Jennifer Ackerman is with the Department of the Interior welcome to all of you Catherine I want to start with you in talking about recruiting challenges and best practices you have something at the Department of Justice called the attorney honors program tell us about that and how does it work well the Department of Justice employees over 10 000 employees throughout our organization so we are always searching for top legal do have an amazing program the Attorney General's honors program which we recruit for year round by reaching out to law schools bar associations and through our ambassador attorney programs we get a quite a number of candidates and from that we hire anywhere from 150 to 200 entry-level attorneys so give me an idea of what your track record has been how how successful has this been it has been an extremely successful program we have hired um amazing attorneys who've gone on to do great things in the department in private sector we've had a number of attorneys who become senior Executives within the government we've had members who become ausas and in fact we have a formal attorney general attorney former Attorney General Eric Holder was an honor grad and Jennifer at the department of the Interior that mission is uh wide-ranging and you've got employees out in the field you've got employees in the office tell me about what you're doing not only for recruiting but for retaining the employees that you have that's a great question Mimi so yes we have 70 000 employees 57 are in place or field-based employees so they're out in the Parks the dams the fish hatcheries and they have their mission hasn't changed during the pandemic so what we're doing to retain our employees is first we ask employees as much as we can how do you like it since you've been here so we're getting positive feedback during the onboarding sessions to make sure that they're we're staying engaged with employees the other one is is we're looking at special salary rates to bring in employees one is our firefighters and we're working with USDA for our Wildland Fire is bringing them up to the current salary with other private sector firefighter community so we're working hard with the office of personnel management and Office of Management and budget because this is very important for our about four to five thousand firefighters and uh and USDA has about 10 to 13 000 firefighters and we want to make sure that there's pay Equity so our firefighters aren't going to the private sector we're also looking for special salary rates for other ones that we're having to compete with the private sector so that's recruiting and then retaining we're also having we also have exit interviews why are people leaving and it they are it is positive usually when people are leaving they're leaving for a promotion but even when they leave for a promotion to another agency about 90 says that say that their time at Department of the interior was positive so we do look at that to see what we can change for moving forward in our exit interview we've had 3 000 respond to our exit interview since we've deployed that so Elias tell me about the talent management system that you have at SBA thank you for having me Mimi yeah our talent management center is our Enterprise Talent learning system which also provides capability for the organization with respect to Performance Management and it's a system that our employees have been able to use in particular doing the pandemic to continue to advance their skills and the educational uh programs in the organization uh by actually uh taking courses uh while they were out in remote settings and telework and doing the pandemic and it's a system that provide us the capability to also conduct Performance Management reviews on a quarterly basis to provide feedback to our employees and allow them to have a conversation with their supervisors about what they have accomplished in the organization during a particular quarter and help us at the end of the process you know with the performance management system uh when the Performance Management cycle closes on September 30th of each year to be able to facilitate and expedite the Performance Management reviews for the employees well tell me a little bit about the career development that you offer as far as supporting your employees in their careers what are you doing there we do an array we have an array of programs in the organization to support Career Development and provide the environment for the organization and employees to ascend in the organization a few examples that I will mention to you uh most recently we were able to expand our mentoring program for our employees and in from FY 2021 to FY 2022 we have had an increase of 60 percent participation in that particular program also what we are doing is we are providing uh the capabilities for employees to participate in the employee development programs of the organization which include uh a lot of the offerings associated with uh the the Franklin Covey models that we have in the organization to improve trust in the organization also to participate in some of the programs that are offered by the office of personal management and the partnership for public service such as the presentation management fellows program as well as the Excellence in government's fellows program so those are a couple of examples but we do have a robust internal uh development program for the employees where they have opportunities to uh apply for detailed opportunities in the organization and also Ascend uh to high levels in the organization and and Catherine regarding career development at Justice I want to hear about your program called leap it's Leadership Excellence and achievement program yes it's a highly successful program that we run it's for high performing GS 13s and 15s throughout the department their component can nominate up to three each with the support of their supervisors for those employees who are thinking about taking on a new step in leadership in their career and we have classroom room instruction we should have them shadowing in fact they do 120 day rotational program out of their component to another component within the department and at the end they do a team-based product a project that they have to breathe out to Department leadership so it's a very competitive program it's highly successful and we've just had Raves about it Jennifer you mentioned collecting data like exit interviews tell me how you're you're doing that and how are you using that data effectively so that you can make better decisions with the workforce so we we are trying to collect as much data as we possibly can but we want to make sure that we're not collecting it just for the sake of collecting it so Kevin mentioned tools and having tools so one we we have our exit interviews we use qualtrex for that and we do give it to the bureau so they can also assess at their levels because our bureaus Park Service fish and wildlife do act independently another thing that we're doing is during the pandemic we did a survey to to survey the supervisors the workforce and the employees how do you feel about um telework remote work and so we use that to lean forward and supervisors and employees did support telework and remote work where it makes sense and so um we we had about 10 000 people to 15 000 people but depending on supervisors and employees because supervisors are employees to respond to that and we looked at that data and we provided that to leadership to say you know we should have a remote work policy we developed a remote work policy and we updated our telework policy and with that being said we do have about 10 percent of our employees that can be remote work and they are remote work and then we have about 37 percent that are taking advantage of telework on a routine basis so with that being said we do use that data we we and we also developing a future of work plan to see where we want to be in one year and in the next five years with reducing the footprint with our space and where do we need to get more I.T in our remote locations so that's what we're doing with our data here at um at Department of the Interior Elias diversity equity and inclusion is a big push for the administration what do you do what are you doing in that area to reach a more diverse pool of candidates and then once you have them how do you keep them yes absolutely we are really really taking diversity inclusion and accessibility to another level at the small business administration starting with analyzing the different process processes that we have in the organization in particular in the area of Recruitment and Retention and a couple of examples that I will mention to you we have established partnership with Coalition universities uh to really uh develop a relationship with our organization to provide access to the employee employment opportunities that we have for the small business administration uh we have also Incorporated diversity and inclusion in our Performance Management System starting at the senior executive level all the way down to the employees in the organization and we are using uh that information to uh to you know to make the necessary changes in our organization to promote uh more diversity and include a more diverse and inclusive workplace uh those a couple of examples are related to the to the Partnerships that I mentioned already but also uh reviewing the data right what is the data telling us in terms about why our employees are leaving the organization so what we've done is we have a very robust onboarding process which require hires employees to participate in a more frequent engagement with each other in terms of a cohort that we put together for new employee employees and also on a quarterly basis we bring the senior leaders to the organization to engage with the employees to provide them additional guidance and information with respect to the mission of the agency Catherine you know I want to ask you about the you know the mission obviously of the federal government is an important Mission it's really incredible work and rewarding work is this a branding issue for the federal government that people aren't applying I think we could do a much better job on branding in the government it is a wonderful place to work it is great career for folks and we could specially do a good better job candidates all right and and your your thoughts Jennifer on that wrap it up for us I I totally agree with that but I think if we can collectively come with how we can modernize the hiring process I know we're working with OPM on that and if we can you know appeal to our younger um Generation Um the Millennials the newer generation on how we can be more modern and promote flexibilities I think that would be great and I know that we're with these fine colleagues here we can do that Mimi um we can make uh the the government a great place to work and speed up the hiring processes as we've all said all right uh you know we're gonna leave it at that thank you so much for the work that you guys are doing and uh for being on the program I appreciate talking to each of you thank you thank you and thank you for watching powering PMA goals Workforce sponsored by servicenow this is our first installment of our powering PMA goal series for more information on the subject matter we just took us today go to govmatters.tv servicenow for the government matters thought leadership Network I'm Mimi gargas thank you foreign