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Newsmaker: OPM's Full Plate
As the head of an organization responsible for nearly two million workers, OPM Director Linda M. Springer faces no shortage of challenges.
If there is any HR executive on the hot seat right now, it's Linda Springer, who is entering her 16th month as director of the United States Office of Personnel Management. As the head of OPM, Springer is the principal adviser to President George W. Bush on personnel management issues for the federal government's civilian workforce. Prior to taking the chief reins at OPM on June 24, 2005, Springer served as controller at the White House Office of Management and Budget and head of the Office of Federal Financial Management. Before that, she spent more than 25 years in the financial services industry: She was senior vice president and controller of Provident Mutual, and also worked at Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Coopers & Lybrand. Springer arrives at OPM as the agency prepares for a wave of retirements by baby boomers in government; struggles to update its policies in the face of resistance by civil service unions; and works to carve out special rules for government agencies on the front lines of the "war on terror." Springer recently spoke with Senior Writer Christopher Cornell about how she's approaching the myriad of issues she must manage. Could you frame the challenge that you're facing at the OPM, especially the demographic challenge?
There are actually two challenges and they're related. Of the 1.8 million people in the federal civilian workforce, somewhere near 60 percent will be eligible to retire in the next 10 years. That doesn't mean they're all going to leave at the first eligibility point, but our actuaries project that somewhere around two-thirds of those eligible, or 40 percent of the total workforce, will actually leave over that period. We're no different than any other employer, but it's just that the numbers are very, very large. The second challenge is that the federal government needs to do more to move into the 21st century in its hiring approach. Obviously, graduating college students would be among the people you would want to attract and recruit. What kind of methods will you use to lure them? Well, certainly that's a group that we're very interested in. We're also interested in people who are mid-career; we're interested in people who are late-career, candidly. We think that government has attractors, if you will, at all of those points in one's career . . . We also, by the way, have profiled that [we may be able to attract] people who want a particular mission to work on, or want certain types of job arrangements--flexibility, unusual hours, non-traditional hours, if you will. With respect to university students, one big thing that we need to do is dispel the notion that if you come to work for the federal government, you're going to be doing the same thing for the rest of your life, behind the same desk, with the same people, and you're just going to not have the type of exciting challenge that you would have in the private sector. Clearly that is not the case. You can do anything you want working for the United States government.
How would you attract mid-career people? As someone moves through their career spectrum, whether it's mid-career or certainly even later career, they're going to be paying less attention to, for example, tuition reimbursement, but more to how they can apply the skills that they've already accumulated. How can they be engaged in projects that have particular meaning to them? So they become more interested in the mission, more interested in making their mark in some way, professionally; where they can still have kind of an entrepreneurial type of approach, but within the confines of a well-established structure. Benefits become even more important as you move through the age spectrum. The federal government has a tremendously good program for health insurance, for retirement. Where you look at the private sector and they're moving away from defined benefit pension plans, we have not only the traditional 401(k) type plan, but we also still retained our defined benefit pension plan. Are there any other kinds of big misperceptions you think that somebody you wanted to recruit might have about working for the government? You've heard that thing about "good enough for government." You know, the sense that they may not be held to the same standards of accountability. I can't speak for the past, but I know that's certainly changing now. How do you plan to get that message across? I think it's a combination of a mass-media approach, the job fairs, the recruitments we do, and I think we're developing a stable of ambassadors in the early career group. I have some plans for engaging some of them to help us go back to their colleges and universities and talk about some of the neat things they're doing. Describe your background, and explain the fit between the things you've done in the past that qualify you to lead OPM.
There are three ways I think I'm particularly well-suited for this job. I've had over two decades in insurance and financial services. I understand the benefit responsibilities and the full spectrum of benefits, through the active as well as the retirement career, that OPM is responsible for. And I understand that not only from an administration standpoint, but from the standpoint of how these products are constructed and designed to meet needs. Second, even though my positions were management positions and, earlier on, technical, I was responsible for a number of years for a section of HR operations at Provident Mutual in the Philadelphia area. So I actually have run HR responsibilities. Thirdly, candidly, when you're running an agency, it's just like conducting an orchestra: You've got to be a good conductor. You've got to be a good manager. You're not the one who's playing the instrument. So what's important here is that they know how to create an environment where people can be successful, and that's a perfectly good fit here. One issue that's been in the news has been efforts to create more flexibility in terms of hiring and discipline at the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. The rationalization for it is that this kind of flexibility is necessary when battling terrorism. But there's been some union pushback. In both those cases, the labor unions have had concern that there could be some erosion of collective-bargaining rights, and so there have been legal challenges. We believe that Congress recognizes, as you said, that there is a security issue that requires that managers are able to respond quickly in emergency situations. But having said that, there are other parts to the reforms that deal specifically with good performance management and development, and pay in recognition of quality and performance. [Under the government's civilian personnel system], you essentially are paid based on longevity. If you show up for enough years, you will get the same type of increase regardless of the level of your performance. We believe that that needs to be changed. We believe that that is a dated system that was responding to problems of the past. On the subject of labor, how would you describe your relationship with the labor unions that you deal with, and how you plan to continue to work with them? I have reached out to the major unions as well as to some of the smaller ones. We've had them in on a number of occasions. We're not going to agree on everything, but we've tried to have some constructive relationships, and there's some areas where we do partner very well. For example, we're developing guidance for the federal workforce in the event of a pandemic flu episode. Last week we brought in a number of representatives from the national offices of the unions that represent federal employees to get ideas on what they thought employees needed to hear. On things like that, we've been able to work together very well. Has your experience at OPM so far given you any sort of insight into the similarities and differences between what you do and what a private sector HR person does? Are there things that you're experiencing now in the federal government that a corporation could learn from? The issues are generally very similar, things like the retirement wave, retaining the institutional knowledge of the older workforce as they leave, continuing to offer benefits but at a reasonable cost, training, hiring. All those things are very much commonalities between the private and the public sectors. The biggest difference, and it's not just an HR issue, is, candidly, that you've got a lot of process to deal with, the pace of change is much slower, an agency head has less autonomy because there are a number of authorities that need to weigh in and shape the policy direction, and certainly the funding. In a corporation, you deal with the board of that corporation; that's a much smaller group than dealing with other parts of the Executive Branch and the United States Congress. In many cases, you have to get legislation passed, and that's another time-consuming and onerous process. So I would say the issues are similar, but the environment in which you need to work to get things done has many more steps and many more people, and that can impact the pace. What can you tell us about what you like to do when you get out of the office, if you ever get any time to relax?
Well, I don't have as much as I used to, to be honest with you. When I was living in Pennsylvania, I used to do more gardening, I used to play the cello in a local orchestra and I used to golf a little bit. At this stage, I do very small amounts of all of those.
September 1, 2006 Copyright 2006© LRP Publications |
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