workforce – Resource Library

As a new year begins, agencies are also making their resolutions. High on their list are ways to keep employees engaged, energized, and focused on meeting mission goals. These are the top three initiatives we’ve seen when helping our clients identify ways to improve the acquisition workforce.

As we wind down 2017 and begin looking forward to a new year, I’ve been thinking about the issues, trends, and themes that are likely to shape the experience of the Federal workforce in the second year of the Trump Administration. And, while I’m not a very good prognosticator – I picked the Falcons to win the Super Bowl, the Nationals to win the World Series, and was betting on August as the release date for the final book from George R.R. Martin in his Song of Fire and Ice Series – I thought I’d take a stab at predicting what workforce trends and themes may emerge in 2018. Here are my top 4 predictions:

On October 19, 2017, Management Concepts participated in a professional development series with the Young Government Leaders (YGL) and Blacks In Government NOW Generation (BIG-NOW). We have been joining forces to create educational networking events to increase the participation and engagement of underrepresented groups within public service. This breakfast event was held in Washington DC and included a dynamic keynote speaker followed by panelists who told compelling personal stories about how they have succeeded in their careers while sharing thoughtful career advice to those in attendance.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading the recent studies from Gallup, SHRM, and the Rand Corporation that describe the current experience of employees in the American workplace. The results from these studies present an interesting and contrasting, portrait of work in the U.S. today.

Every day there are countless articles and studies casting aspersions on millennials. This cohort of young adults has been blamed for the declining viability of chain restaurants, gyms, diamonds, and even the National Football League.

Millennials are frequently stereotyped as selfish, entitled, and disloyal to their organizations. For this reason, HR specialists, leadership, and managers alike may find it difficult to cater to this growing segment of the global workforce.

On June 29 in Washington, D.C., Management Concepts sponsored the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) event, “Stabilizing the Workforce in an Uncertain Future,” featuring our top experts and leaders in People & Performance Consulting as well as experts in Federal workforce development from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Defense and Treasury departments, and Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs.

For complex organizations like Federal agencies, undergoing change can be very difficult. As the recent report by Management Concepts and Human Capital Media, “Successful Change Management Practices in the Public Sector” found, Federal agencies have a mixed record of achievement as they struggle to deal with changes arising from organizational realignment, new technology implementation, and changes in the Federal workforce. Despite this mixed record, the major elements of a successful change management are now well understood, and require a comprehensive approach that includes having a vision of where the organization wants to go, making sure individuals are skilled in change management, providing sufficient resources to support change management activities, as well as creating and sticking to a detailed change action plan.

Succession planning is becoming a valuable strategy for organizations to undertake when looking to minimize the impact of changes on its workforce. Although still not widely utilized across Federal agencies, it is becoming recognized as an important talent management and change management strategy for retaining leaders at all levels and thus reducing disruptions caused by continual turnover. Here are two reasons this rings true:

The quest to improve management of change in public sector agencies is by no means a new one. In 2006, Frank Ostroff, writing in the Harvard Business Review comments, that “the greatest challenge in bringing about successful change and significant, sustained performance improvement in the public sphere is not so much identifying solutions, which are mostly straightforward, as working around the unique obstacles” that are found in the public sector organizations.

Tag: workforce