Shifting Federal Employees Away from Low-Value Work
Recent updates to the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Cross Agency Priority (CAP) Goals have focused on shifting federal employees away from low-value work toward high-value work.
The President’s Management Agenda lays out a long-term vision for modernizing the federal government in key areas that will improve the ability of agencies to deliver mission outcomes, provide excellent service, and effectively steward taxpayer dollars on behalf of the American people. Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals are used to drive management priorities to coordinate and publicly track implementation across federal agencies.
Mike Rigas, Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and Emily Murphy, Administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), provided updates on the progress of the CAP Goal focused on Shifting from Low-Value to High-Value Work.
Low-value work is defined as that which is outdated, redundant, or unnecessary. Federal employees can and should put their skills to better use by transitioning to high-value work instead, according to the update. Agencies have shifted full time employees to high-value work with hundreds of initiatives designed to help them put their skills sets to better use and achieve more for the federal workforce while saving billions of dollars. Examples include:
50+ initiatives leveraging broad-scale process improvement and standardization.
30+ initiatives using robotics process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and/or other innovative software.
20 initiatives focused on the digitalization of processes within an agency.
Cumbersome tasks like putting together often already outdated Congressional reports have also been eradicated to save time and energy. The project also found a baseline for what is considered low-value work and released a few highlights from 243,000 employees across 24 agencies:
13.2 percent of employee time (on average in a typical 40-hour workweek) is spent on work employees consider low-value.
Extrapolated government-wide, this represents approximately 500 million hours spent each year performing low-value work.
On the basis of these findings, OMB is reassessing its CAP Goals and putting forth new and improved recommendations including:
Workload automation: Facilitate agency adoption of innovative automation technologies.
Workload reduction: Foster agency identification and delivery of impactful workload reduction initiatives.
Requirement elimination: Eliminate outdated reporting requirements.
Burden assessment: Institute assessment of burden as part of OMB guidance development.
The elimination, optimization, and automation (EOA) effort began in the General Services Administration Office of the Chief Financial Officer and a case study is included in the report. The study identified four principles that will be key as federal agencies move from low-value work to high-value work. These principles are encouraged if the recommendations are to work for federal agencies.
Do not wait for the perfect plan to get started
Strive for consensus not 100% agreement
Make peace with uncertainty
Set aggressive goals and timelines
The case study then details the transformation to high-value services and steps that can be taken to drive high-value services for partners and customers of federal agencies. It explains the following:
Rapid organizational assessment- an assessment of the current level of operations and the organizational challenges that are preventing the implementation of high-value services.
Short-term wins and long-term strategy- after opportunities are identified in the Rapid Assessment, operational quick wins should be identified and implemented, and long-term strategy should be developed for structural, leadership, and business process improvements.
Structural and Procedural changes- Reorganization and process improvement to implement opportunities identified in the assessment, and to mitigate existing challenges.
Eliminate, Optimize, and Automate Initiative- Identification and implementation of projects to eliminate unnecessary workload, optimize/automate low-value services, and establish new high-value services.
Cultural change and assessment- Identifying opportunities for all staff to contribute, and transforming organizational culture to one that promotes increased employee engagement and a bias towards action.
New CAP Goal leaders have also been announced in order to help facilitate to advancement of these recommendations. GSA Deputy Administrator Allison Brigati and Chief Financial Officer Gerard Badorrek are spearheading this movement within government. In a joint statement they said, “A large portion of the Shifting from Low-Value to High-Value Work action plan is dedicated to accelerating the government-wide adoption of emerging technologies like Robotic Process Automation, Intelligent Automation, and Artificial Intelligence. These new digital workers can complete the tasks that distract employees from mission critical work, and create significant capacity for higher value analytics, management and planning functions.”
In recent years, the Shifting from Low-Value to High-Value Work Team issued a comprehensive RPA Playbook and developed a Federal RPA Community of Practice (CoP) where over 1,000 federal employees from 50 agencies are working together to accelerate RPA adoption.
Brigati and Badorrek emphasized a need to learn from the private sector, which constantly seeks ways to optimize and advance its operations. They wrote that the same mentality must be incorporated in the public sector as well so employees are not wasting their time on redundant tasks. They also stress the need for employee inclusion in the low-value work to high-value work shift. They said, “Employee-led transformations are generally more successful and enduring, and can take advantage of their deep subject matter expertise. Whether through surveying, focus groups, process consultations, or other feedback mechanisms, employees want to be heard and have immense value to add.”
