As agencies take on heightened expectations to improve federal recruitment and retention, they’re also getting some new words of wisdom from the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA).

In a September report, NAPA laid out six key strategies agencies can implement to reach better recruitment and retention, and by extension, agency performance and “organizational health” — or in other words, the ability to deliver services, fulfill priorities and meet mission.

Agency leaders can think of the new report as a sort of “playbook,” covering distinct strategies for measuring and improving their performance, according to Terry Gerton, NAPA’s president and CEO.

“Our contention in the report really is, you can’t not do any one of those six,” Gerton said in an interview with Federal News Network. “What order you may do them in, in your particular agency, depends on the most urgent problems that you have to solve. But eventually, you have to put all of those pieces together to build a strong, resilient, capable, healthy organization.”

The six strategies that NAPA said feed into better organizational health are: A “bold vision;” a supportive environment; effective communication with employees; opportunities for continuous learning; modernized federal recruitment; and support from “central management” agencies, such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management.

For each of those strategies, NAPA detailed specific actions agencies can take to reach their goals for the workforce. And of course, each agency will have their own distinct objectives and goals for the workforce.

“It’s not complicated, it’s not dense — it’s really designed to be accessible for leaders at every level to start working on that,” Gerton said. “But inside there, [agencies] each have very unique considerations, very unique constraints.”

The path to become a “healthy” agency has shifted

The new NAPA report was more than a year in the making and comes at the request of OMB and the General Services Administration. It’s designed to be easy to understand, and something agencies can pick up and read as needed. It’s also an update to NAPA’s 2018 report, which laid out several initial strategies for agencies to try to improve the government’s overall performance.

In the years since the 2018 report came out, NAPA said there have been numerous developments in the challenges facing agencies and the federal workforce, including the COVID-19 pandemic and an increase in hybrid work. Proposals that “hinder” organizations, like Schedule F, and an increased emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, have also contributed to significant shifts for the federal workforce, NAPA added.

“There’s certainly been a lot of questions about how people work together in this new environment,” Gerton said. “It’s an important time to revisit those kinds of questions and think about, how do you bring all of those considerations into play, to optimize the work that you do, and the impact of the work that you do.”

Especially as more employees become eligible for retirement in an aging federal workforce, agencies are at a critical moment for trying to onboard the right talent and skills to be able address complex challenges. For NAPA, the processes defining how agencies recruit and retain employees leave much to be desired. But at the same time, agencies have the opportunity to make improvements by focusing on factors that typically make for a “healthy” organization, NAPA said. That can include things like incorporating interesting and impactful work, effective leadership, inclusivity, and psychological safety, the report explained.

What NAPA says can take agencies to the next level

One of the six strategies NAPA detailed is for agencies to create a “bold vision” that clarifies the roles and strategies of the organization. Then, agencies can break down their goals by creating measurable objectives, and establishing ways to observe progress — for example, through a data dashboard.

In another of the report’s strategies, NAPA said it’s also important to offer continuous learning and opportunities to develop skills, for instance, by defining career paths at an agency, setting up coaching and mentoring programs, and offering leadership training earlier on in employees’ careers.

But improving the overall “health” of an agency also ties back to communication and engagement with federal employees, according to NAPA. The 2024 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) results showed the highest ever employee engagement score governmentwide — 73%. But at the same time, less than half of 2024 FEVS respondents agreed that management involves employees in decisions affecting their work.

“Do the leaders of the organization include everyone in the conversation and in the mission strategy, communicating effectively and engaging employees?” Gerton said. “You can’t just say, ‘here’s our bold vision,’ and then not engage your employees in the conversation around what you’re going to do with that.”

Agency leaders can get employee input by incorporating those discussions into already-existing structures, such as annual performance reviews, NAPA said.

After receiving employee feedback, NAPA said agency leaders should then create “action plans” to make sure they actually address the issues that employees’ input reveals. That can be through hosting listening sessions, discussing FEVS results and notifying employees of any changes they made in response to feedback. Agencies can also drill down on OPM’s FEVS dashboard to more closely analyze the survey results.

Part of the responsibility of improving organizational health also falls to leaders at OMB and OPM. Building on a federal hiring experience memo earlier this year, NAPA said it’s important for those two agencies to help ensure the recommended strategies actually fall in place. For example, OPM should help agencies promote the use of shared certificates across agencies, and create more governmentwide, pooled hiring opportunities, NAPA said.

Of course, improving the health of an agency is much easier said than done. In fact, NAPA said in its report that healthy agencies are “hard to build and easy to wreck.” But at the same time, Gerton said she’s starting to see signs of agencies taking on the work and making progress.

“What we’re starting to hear already is that between OMB guidance and this report, now leaders feel like they have the information that they need and the guidance that they need to start moving forward,” Gerton said. “Now that it’s accessible, people feel like it’s not so esoteric anymore, that this is really now something that they can do.”

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