Federal workforce reform: Meeting OMB’s employee engagement and performance mandates

Federal agencies face a perennial challenge: How to recruit and keep an engaged workforce. That challenge has grown more acute, however, in the face of new administration mandates for workforce reductions and reforms — and renewed pressures to improve employee performance and outcomes.

Yet many agency and program leaders continue to lack modern and commonly-available technology tools to track, manage and support employee performance.

The adoption rate of federal performance management systems remains relatively low — less than 15 percent, according to a new guide for improving employee performance and engagement aimed at federal HR, human capital, business unit and IT leaders. The guide, published by Acendre, a talent management solutions provider, highlights ways to improve employee engagement, morale, retention and performance.

The slow rate of technology adoption not only hinders engagement, it also exacerbates chronic talent gaps at federal agencies, according to the guide, and makes it more difficult to compete for talent, retain millennials and address an aging workforce.

The good news, however, is that frequently-cited obstacles to adoption — cumbersome systems, security concerns and unique intra-agency processes — no longer need be impediments for getting started with modern performance management technology.

According to the guide:
• Systems can be implemented incrementally
• Modern systems are cloud-based
• There is low risk to implementation
• There are high success rates
• Modern systems meet stringent federal security requirements
• Systems are agile
• Modern performance management systems have a low cost

In fact, a modern, data-driven approach to improved performance management has emerged as a blueprint for federal agency transformation thanks to a new generation of tools that keep it simple, minimize risk and cost, and achieve evolutionary organizational outcomes.

Download the guide and learn how your agency can elevate its workforce.

This article was produced by FedScoop for, and sponsored by, Acendre.