The President’s Management Agenda: A Modern Civil Service
Several aspects of the new President's Management Agenda (PMA) are beneficial, from empowering the federal workforce to ensuring the federal government provides services as effectively and efficiently as possible. These are sound and relevant principles.
Our focus today is a few of the key points and issues raised by the PMA.
President Biden is quoted in the PMA, “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about dignity.” This applies to the federal workforce even more than it does as a general concept. Federal employees are civil servants. Service in the federal government is a calling to public service. Federal employees are patriotic citizens who want to serve America and improve the lives of their fellow citizens. Ensuring that they can do so effectively is a key part of why Federal Managers Association (FMA) exists.
Priority one of the PMA is to “take new steps to attract, hire, involve, develop, support, and empower talent who can help us meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.” It is no secret that the federal government has struggled to attract and employ young qualified and talented employees, and hiring reform is a key priority for FMA. Reforming the hiring system to take advantage of the best private sector hiring practices, as proposed in the PMA, is a critical step to address this shortfall. A strong system of hiring and attracting young talent today is the best way to address the increasing number of retirements as employees with decades of experience continue to reach retirement age.
The PMA promises to be guided in this by science and data. The federal government is different from private employers in a few key details. One such difference is the amount of training needed for certain roles. At the Department of Defense (DOD), for example, many jobs might require two or more years of on-the-job training. Another key difference is that, after an initial probationary period, it can be difficult to remove underperforming employees.
Sometimes, these two things can align in unfortunate ways. When DOD had a one-year probationary period, it was common for managers to be forced to make a keep-or-fire call on half-trained employees, with no way of knowing what their actual performance would look like after they were fully trained. FMA was successful at winning a two-year probationary period at DOD to address this – an improvement which is now in danger of being rolled back by the House version of the NDAA, even though a study ordered by Congress, being carried out by the RAND Corporation, has yet to deliver findings on the efficacy of this policy change. We hope that the Biden administration will lend its support to keeping the two-year probationary period in place so that this important decision can be made based on the facts and data.
Support for federal employee unions is a key part of the PMA, as part of a broader effort to ensure that the voices of federal employees are heard. Giving federal employees agency and the ability to advocate for what they need to do their jobs effectively and to ensure a good work environment is a laudable and important goal.
Unions can serve as organizers and advocates for non-supervisory employees. Supervisors and managers however are barred from joining employee unions. This makes perfect sense, as there can be times when employees and managers have differing interests, and both deserve a dedicated voice to advocate for them. For supervisors and managers, that advocate is a professional association like the Federal Managers Association, the oldest and largest association of such organizations.
The feds we represent tend to be career feds, with decades of invaluable experience in their jobs at all levels of government. If non-supervisory feds are the heart and muscle of the federal government, supervisors and managers are the central nervous system and skeleton, keeping everything organized and ensuring that the right information gets to their employees so that the entire organization can act effectively and in concert. Their perspectives may sometimes be different from those of non-supervisory employees. Neither perspective is necessarily wrong – both are valuable. We intend to work with the Biden administration to ensure that the voices of managers are assigned equal weight to those of union employees.
If you are not already a member of FMA, please consider becoming a member.
The views reflected in this column are those of FMA and do not necessarily represent the views of FEDmanager. To learn more about the Federal Managers Association (FMA), visit their website: FedManagers.org.