The Office of Personnel Management really pulled out all the stops at today’s event announcing President Obama’s reforms to the federal hiring process. Held in an auditorium at OPM’s E Street offices, it had the feel of a campaign event, with U2’s “Beautiful Day” playing on loudspeakers before the event as media, special guests and OPM employees took their seats. Marvin Carraway, one of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency officers credited with stopping a gunman at the Pentagon subway station March 4, was on hand as one example of an exemplary federal employee. He got a standing ovation. OPM director…
Browsing: Office of Personnel Management
Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry is a full-fledged convert to the Results Oriented Work Environment theory of employee management, under which employees are given complete leeway to choose where and when they work, as long as they get their jobs done. He’s even getting ready to experiment with the ROWE program at OPM headquarters and its facility in Boyers, Pa. But will it work? We’d like to hear from employees and managers alike about the potential benefits and pitfalls of such a program, and the challenges that might come from trying to change an office’s culture so thoroughly. E-mail…
Any Washington reporter will tell you that most senior government leaders go out of their way to avoid cracking a joke or saying anything remotely controversial. But not Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, who (I assume) ad-libbed hilariously at IRMCO this morning while discussing some lingering resistance to the government’s new central hiring register program: I’ve been going around, talking to managers, [saying] “What’s going on?” Sometimes people have long memories in this town, in Washington, and evidently I found out OPM had done registers a long time ago, and they did them kind of half-assed. And the…
As God is my witness, KSAs as an initial screening tool will fall. – Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, channelling Scarlett O’Hara in his address to the IRMCO conference this morning. Seriously, though, Berry outlined the future role he wants knowledge, skills and abilities essays to play in the government’s hiring process. Some agencies will likely still require finalists for a job opening to write essays outlining their experience and special skills, Berry said, but they shouldn’t need KSAs from thousands of first-round applicants. “Whittle it down until you’ve got the pool of 10 or 20,” Berry said.…
I’ve made no secret of my skepticism about the Obama administration’s purported desire to “make government cool again.” But Matt Collier, a senior advisor to Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, is sticking with it, and at IRMCO this morning threw out a recruitment pitch I honestly had never considered: You know there’s someone in the Inspector General’s office at Homeland Security who has to do penetration tests. How cool is it to try to sneak a gun through airport security?
Traffic’s gonna be ugly next week in Washington — way uglier than usual. President Obama and the leaders of more than 40 other countries will be meeting at the Washington Convention Center Monday and Tuesday for a major nuclear weapons summit, and several nearby streets will be completely closed. So the Office of Personnel Management is advising Washington-area federal employees to telework or use alternative work schedules on Monday and Tuesday. The road closures are likely to snarl traffic throughout downtown Washington, and parking restrictions, detoured buses and the temporary closure of the Mount Vernon Square Metro Station won’t help either. OPM…
Office of Personnel Management employees in Washington will get a treat later this week: an hour off to view the cherry blossoms and squeeze in a little exercise. OPM Director John Berry issued a memo March 26 to the nearly 1,500 employees at the agency’s Washington headquarters granting them an hour off from April 1 to 4 to walk down to the Tidal Basin and see the blossoms. Those four days will be the blossoms’ peak blooming days. Berry has made promoting wellness initiatives and encouraging federal employees to be healthier a major part of his agenda. This excused absence…
Federal Times would like to hear from federal employees who might be affected by the health care reform bill passed last week. Do you have an adult child who can get health coverage as a result of the bill? Are you concerned about the excise tax or how it might affect your premiums? Are you worried that putting the Office of Personnel Management in charge of insurance exchanges could take its attention away from its traditional missions? Send us an e-mail at slosey@federaltimes.com.
Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry yesterday officially downgraded the government’s estimates of its per-day losses during last month’s snowstorms. Instead of losing $102 million per day, Berry now says the government only lost $71 million per day. But there is reason to take those calculations with a grain of salt. Berry first threw out the $102 million daily loss estimate during a December press conference on snow closure procedures. That was a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation of the total daily payroll for all 270,000 federal employees in the Washington area, and assumed total losses in productivity. That estimate was clearly…
A noteworthy commentary in this morning’s Washington Examiner highlights an issue that we’ve previously reported: How few federal employees are fired in a given year. The column, which cites our coverage on the issue, criticizes the Office of Personnel Management for failing to analyze why so few employees are fired — just one half of 1 percent of the government’s 2 million employees last year. (It’s also worth noting that the writer of the column, Mark Hemingway, is the husband of one of our former staff writers.) What I found most interesting, however, was the headline above the column: “More…