Estimates of Federal Employees' Available Time for Work Distort Work Force Requirements

For many years, considerable attention has been paid to estimating overall work in determining the Federal Government's civilian personnel requirements. However, little attention has been paid to the availability of the work force--the portion of time that workers are available to perform their primary duties after deducting the time they are unavailable because of absence. Eight Federal agencies were surveyed to determine the reliability of the processes and data used to estimate the availability of Federal civilian workers.