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At Labor Dept, Workforce Restructuring in Progress
By:
Stephen Barr
The Bush administration has asked major agencies to complete workforce restructuring plans so that the government can figure out staffing requirements for the next few years, when large numbers of employees will become eligible to retire. The restructuring plans also will try to accommodate President Bush's campaign promises to pare middle management and to determine whether more federal work can be turned over to the private sector. The president's budget, released last week, shows that several agencies have started to reshape their staffs. It's too early to say how these efforts will play out. But the administration has promised to keep score. The budget's "management scorecard" gave low marks (a red dot) to most agencies on personnel planning. But a few agencies were portrayed as making progress (a yellow dot). One of them was the Labor Department, which offers an example of workforce restructuring in the Bush administration. According to the fiscal 2003 budget, the Labor Department "will implement significant restructuring to better align its workforce with its mission. It will eliminate 373 positions that are unnecessary, resulting in savings of $31 million." Most of the positions to be abolished are in the management ranks, according to department officials. To ease the change, Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao has announced that the department will offer early retirement (but no cash buyouts) to qualified employees from March 1 through Sept. 30. About 4,000 of the Labor Department's 17,000 employees are eligible to volunteer for early retirement because they have at least 20 years of federal service and are at least 50 years old or because they have 25 years of service. (The offer is off-limits to employees of the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration, at the request of the agency, officials said.) The early-out offer follows a workforce initiative aimed at overhauling the "performance management system" for Labor's 2,100 senior executives, managers and supervisors. The new job appraisal system will take into account the president's management agenda, Chao's priorities and the goals established by the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act. "Alignment and accountability become essential components of achieving success and assuring that we demonstrate key managerial competencies," Chao said last year when she announced that the department would create a new job-appraisal system. One of Chao's goals is to set up a uniform system for job evaluations. After taking office, the Bush team at Labor found varied standards and different rating systems in use. "At the end of the year, when you were comparing ratings, it was a little like apples and oranges," said Patrick Pizzella, assistant secretary for administration and management. Under the new system, executives, managers and supervisors will be ranked on a five-level system. Performance will be rated as exemplary, highly effective, effective, minimally satisfactory or unsatisfactory. The executives, managers and supervisors will be judged on four, broad-based "managerial competencies": leadership, resource management, coalition building, and problem solving and initiative. In addition, each division or bureau within Labor will select four job-rating standards that directly connect each individual to the organization's objectives. Chao, in a bid to stress the importance of job performance and program results, increased the bonus pool for senior executives from 5 percent of their total salaries to 7.5 percent. "I don't know of any departments higher than that," Pizzella said. "This is a way to make sure we award appropriately senior executives who are helping implement the president's agenda and achieve the results that the department and taxpayers are seeking." FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Action on Aging distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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