HERSHEY, Pa. — Over the last 15 years, agencies have focused on fixing the federal hiring process. Recent data from the Office of Personnel Management shows, on average, agencies take 101.2 days to hire a new employee.

While that process is far from perfect, the Office of Management and Budget is starting to look at keeping those employees once they have been hired.

Kristy Daphnis, the federal workforce branch chief at the Office of Management and Budget, said part of how agencies can improve how they retain employees is tied by to the focus on employee experience.

“In addition to just looking at the overall experience, looking at engagement and looking at all the metrics around the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and any pulse surveys that agencies might be doing on their employees, is to really think about how do you — especially in some of these fields where there is a clear career path — communicate that career path to that occupation, to that workforce? And how do you build and grow an employee, maybe from early career talent up through the ranks into leadership?” Daphnis said during the ImaginationNation Conference sponsored by ACT-IAC yesterday. “There’s a lot of work that can be done there, and there’s a lot of opportunity for us to be able to help people through that process. That might mean thinking a little bit differently about various functional workforces. I know that we’ve been working a lot with the Office of Personal Management to think about the HR workforce. For example, we know that there are people that are staying in government and might be moving from one agency to another. How do you capitalize on that knowledge base?”

The idea is to think of the employees in HR, for instance, as part of a larger enterprise versus just a bunch of employees at an agency.

Daphnis said it’s critical to think about that HR career path and how can the community help an individual grow and develop, while also keeping them engaged in the system for the long term.

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy recently gave the federal effort to retain acquisition workers a big push in a new memo. OFPP is requiring all agencies to develop specific retention programs. Christina Harada, the senior advisor for OFPP, said the acquisition workforce is falling behind in hiring and keeping newer acquisition workers. She said throughout the federal government, 21% of the employees are in GS grades 5-9. But only 12% of the Defense Department contracting professionals are in those grades and only 8% of civilian agency contracting professionals are in those grades.

Hiring improvements for cyber workers

Daphnis said OMB and OPM are just in the “early stages” of discussing how best to improve the recruitment, retention and development of that HR workforce.

But if the data from OPM is any sign, the opportunities for retention are ripe. OPM said the average time to hire HR workers is lowest among across all three mission critical occupations at 70.5 days, on average, and agencies have hired more than 33,000 HR employees between fiscal 2021 and 2023.

Daphnis said OMB already has kicked off similar efforts with the White House Office of the National Cyber Director to improve the hiring of cybersecurity workers.

She said the federal cyber workforce working group has met with not just chief information security officers, but also chief financial officers and chief human capital officers as part of developing a legislative proposal for Congress to consider.

“The reality is you can’t have a strong workforce and strong support of that workforce if you don’t have collaboration across the different functional areas of an agency. You can’t have that strategic workforce planning in place and you can’t execute on it unless you’re planning for it, are funding it and are actually moving it forward in your agency’s priority,” she said. “One way that that can happen is through better collaboration across the council relationships, both amongst our CIO Council, our CHCO Council, our Performance Improvement Council and all of the executive councils because the reality is, we are all in this together. If you don’t have the various leaders, the C-suite, leaders, in an agency coming together to solve the problems within that agency, it will be difficult to make progress.”

In fact, for the first time in a year or more, the CHCO Council and PIO Council are holding a joint meeting on Nov. 7.

Daphnis said she expects the two groups to discuss how the workforce supports their agencies’ performance goals and how can agencies align their workforce in a better way to achieve their mission delivery goals.

“We’re going to be focusing a lot on organizational health and performance. We’re going to be doing a readout of the strategic reviews from the summer. We’re going to be thinking about how do we best leverage each of these groups to better achieve the strategic objectives of the agency,” she said. “We’re going to do some resource sharing, and we’re going to be talking a bit about the National Academy for Public Administration (NAPA) report that was just released. It’s an interesting read if you haven’t taken a look, but it really does a good job of starting to connect areas where the workforce is supporting organizational health and performance and the ways in which that happens on the ground. So it’s definitely worth reading. I’m sure that we’ll be having more discussion around that, and more discussion around how the workforce is actually helping to enable organizational health and performance more generally.”

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