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Workforce Planning: Interior, EPA, and the Forest Service Should Strengthen Linkages to Their Strategic Plans and Improve Evaluation

GAO-10-413 Published: Mar 31, 2010. Publicly Released: Mar 31, 2010.
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Highlights

GAO and others have shown that successful organizations use strategic workforce planning to help meet present and future mission requirements. Although agency approaches to strategic workforce planning can vary depending on needs and mission, GAO and the Office of Personnel Management have identified six leading principles that workforce planning should address. The Appropriations Committees directed GAO to review workforce planning at the Department of the Interior (Interior), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service. GAO examined (1) workforce planning processes used at each agency, (2) the extent to which these processes incorporate the six principles, and (3) how, if at all, the agencies link workforce planning with the annual budget allocation processes. GAO reviewed agencies' workforce plans, strategic plans, and budget documents and interviewed human resources, planning, and budget officials.

Recommendations

Recommendations for Executive Action

Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Agriculture To ensure that Interior, EPA, and the Forest Service more fully incorporate leading workforce planning principles into their workforce planning efforts, the Secretary of the Interior, the Administrator of EPA, and the Secretary of Agriculture, through the Chief of the Forest Service, should incorporate into their agency's workforce plans clear and explicit links between the workforce plans and the strategic plan, and describe how the workforce plans will help the agency achieve its strategic goals.
Closed – Implemented
In August 2015, the Forest Service issued a new Strategic Plan for FY2015-FY2020 that replaces the agency's FY2007 to FY2012 plan. As a companion to these, the Forest Service's completed workforce plan for FY2014-2018 and draft plan for FY2016-FY2019 incorporate clear and explicit links to the agency's strategic plan, as we recommended.
Department of the Interior To ensure that Interior, EPA, and the Forest Service more fully incorporate leading workforce planning principles into their workforce planning efforts, the Secretary of the Interior, the Administrator of EPA, and the Secretary of Agriculture, through the Chief of the Forest Service, should incorporate into their agency's workforce plans clear and explicit links between the workforce plans and the strategic plan, and describe how the workforce plans will help the agency achieve its strategic goals.
Closed – Not Implemented
Interior has developed a strategic workforce management plan that outlines the strategies the Department is currently using and that it plans to expand over the coming years. According to officials, the workforce management plan will help the Department manage workforce levels to more effectively deploy resources in consideration of emerging needs, skills gaps, outdated and outmoded requirements, and be positioned to respond to constrained budgets. Interior has also developed a workforce planning manual to help guide staff who are tasked with developing workforce plans. However, as of June 2017, Interior has not developed any updated workforce plans prepared by its bureaus or offices since our report was issued in March 2010. Until Interior provides updated workforce plans for each of the bureaus and offices, we are unable to determine whether these plans incorporate clear and explicit links to the strategic plan and how the plans will help Interior achieve its strategic goals.
Department of the Interior To ensure that Interior, EPA, and the Forest Service more fully incorporate leading workforce planning principles into their workforce planning efforts, the Secretary of the Interior, the Administrator of EPA, and the Secretary of Agriculture, through the Chief of the Forest Service, should establish mechanisms that their agency can use to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of its workforce planning efforts, particularly in achieving the agency's strategic goals.
Closed – Not Implemented
As of June 2017, Interior has not provided any updated workforce plans prepared by its bureaus or offices since our report was issued in March 2010. Until Interior provides updated workforce plans for these bureaus and offices, we cannot review any mechanisms the department may have developed to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of such plans in achieving its strategic goals.
Department of Agriculture To ensure that Interior, EPA, and the Forest Service more fully incorporate leading workforce planning principles into their workforce planning efforts, the Secretary of the Interior, the Administrator of EPA, and the Secretary of Agriculture, through the Chief of the Forest Service, should establish mechanisms that their agency can use to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of its workforce planning efforts, particularly in achieving the agency's strategic goals.
Closed – Implemented
The Forest Service's completed workforce plan for FY2014-FY2018 contains an Implementation Action Plan, which agency officials said they use to manage, coordinate, and monitor progress towards achieving human capital goals. We reviewed a related Monitoring and Evaluation Report and found that it tracks the agency's progress in taking specific actions. For example, one action item is to conduct a rigorous technical assessment of mission critical occupations. In some instances, the action items and findings identify quantifiable measures.
Environmental Protection Agency To ensure that Interior, EPA, and the Forest Service more fully incorporate leading workforce planning principles into their workforce planning efforts, the Secretary of the Interior, the Administrator of EPA, and the Secretary of Agriculture, through the Chief of the Forest Service, should establish mechanisms that their agency can use to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of its workforce planning efforts, particularly in achieving the agency's strategic goals.
Closed – Implemented
In light of sweeping fiscal changes in 2013, EPA officials said their workforce planning efforts began to focus on evaluating the impacts of agency-wide use of voluntary early retirement authority (VERA) and voluntary separation incentive payments (VSIP). Specifically, in spring 2015, following the second round of VERA and VSIP opportunities, the agency developed office-specific strategic hiring templates that documented the business cases used to support those decisions, the positions vacated by that decision, and the hiring that was made following that to fill some of the vacancies, according to agency officials. Further, EPA started using the Office of Personnel Management's HRStat Initiative as a mechanism to monitor agency hiring that occurred after a VERA and VSIP announcement. HRStat provides senior leaders with information on hiring and how the hiring compares with the major workforce planning goals associated with the VERA and VSIP opportunity.
Environmental Protection Agency To ensure that Interior, EPA, and the Forest Service more fully incorporate leading workforce planning principles into their workforce planning efforts, the Secretary of the Interior, the Administrator of EPA, and the Secretary of Agriculture, through the Chief of the Forest Service, should incorporate into their agency's workforce plans clear and explicit links between the workforce plans and the strategic plan, and describe how the workforce plans will help the agency achieve its strategic goals.
Closed – Not Implemented
EPA has not yet fully implemented the recommendation to incorporate into the agency's workforce plans clear and explicit links between the workforce plans and the strategic plan. According to EPA officials, each regional office and headquarters program office considers the agency's strategic plan, the Administrator's priorities, and budget commitments while the agency is planning what workforce it will need. Since 2012, the final product of this effort is a workforce planning gap analysis, rather than a workforce plan, and officials say the gap analysis report is used to develop plans and strategies for obtaining needed skills over the long term. However, the gap analysis reports for 2012-2015 and 2013-2016 did not provide explicit links to the strategic plan. Furthermore, EPA officials said the 2013 gap analysis report for 2013-2016 remains unpublished because prior to its release, the agency faced fiscal change related to sequestration, furloughs and, additional budget restrictions, dramatically altering workforce demographic projections and the strategic recommendations in the report. According of agency officials as of May 2016, each regional and program office develop a voluntary early retirement authority (VERA) and voluntary separation incentive payments (VSIP)business case that clearly linked the agency's strategic plan with their ongoing, office-specific priorities and workforce needs. The business case was focused on restructuring the workforce to meet strategic priorities by eliminating unnecessary skill sets and bring in those skills to meet strategic demands. These are positive steps however improved agencywide strategic workforce planning needs to continue to improve. In particular, the EPA Inspector General noted in its Fiscal Year 2016 Management Challenges report that EPA's offices have not conducted a systematic workload analysis or identified workforce needs for budget justification purposes and that such analysis is critically important to mission accomplishment. The report also noted that EPA currently plans to apply workload analysis tools to task-driven agency functions, such as grants and contracts, but that EPA still needs to more broadly quantify what its full workload entails so that it can more effectively prioritize and allocate limited resources to accomplish agency work.
Department of Agriculture To further capitalize on the Forest Service's existing workforce planning efforts, the Secretary of Agriculture, through the Chief of the Forest Service, should establish processes for (1) communicating the recommendations in the agency's annual 5-year workforce plans; (2) assigning responsibility and establishing time frames for implementing the recommendations; and (3) tracking implementation of the recommendations.
Closed – Implemented
FS has implemented this recommendation by taking steps to establish processes for communicating about workforce planning, assigning responsibility and establishing time frames for implementation, and tracking implementation. Specifically, with regard to communicating about workforce planning, in June 2014, the Chief of the Forest Service formally chartered a Forest Service Human Capital Planning Committee to oversee all aspects of human capital planning for the agency. The charter states that the committee chair is to, among other things, work with the Director of Human Resources Management to present committee recommendations to the National Leadership Council and Executive Leadership Team. The committee is to include an executive representative or sponsor as an executive leadership liaison to the committee, with the role of ensuring two-way communication with FS executive leadership. The Forest Service also developed a formal workforce planning communication plan dated June 2014, and agency officials told us that implementation is scheduled to begin in FY 2015. In addition, with regard to assigning responsibility and establishing time frames for implementing various workforce planning actions identified by the agency, in FY 2013, the FS developed an action plan for improving human capital planning processes. The plan includes a set of 13 "action items", each with a due date and an "owner" identified. The Forest Service provided documentation to support that they have tracked progress toward the dates for these action items. With regard to tracking implementation of the recommendations, the FS is in the process of gathering a team to begin this process and expects it will be in place by the end of FY2014.

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