The People Factor

Washington Post Q&A with Scott Gould

The Department of Veterans Affairs' plan to hire over 100,000 new employees is the focus of a conversation with W. Scott Gould in the Washington Post. Drawing on material from The People Factor, Gould said "At the end of the day, the ability to hire someone and do it well is an intensely personal management-supervisor-level decision. . . . How do you identify what those job requirements are? That's a skill that we have to give and raise up for a lot of our managers. We have a lot of middle-level managers who have to learn how to do this in a different way."

Read the full interview. 

Linda Bilmes' Op-ed on the Federal Workforce in The Boston Globe

In an op-ed in The Boston Globe, Linda Bilmes explains why a hiring freeze on federal jobs won't help the budget deficit in the short term--and will have unintended consequences in the long run.

Government today desperately needs to hire in order to replace retiring employees and fill growing workload demands. Nearly 80 percent of the new hiring is taking place in just five agencies - Defense, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the State Department.

These civil servants are caring for our wounded and returning veterans, providing essential support for our troops fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and protecting the country from terrorist threats at airports and land borders and through intelligence work.

Read the full article.

Federal News Radio cites The People Factor

Alan P. Balutis, writing for Federal News Radio, draws on The People Factor to illustrate the true size of the government. According to the book, although the number of civil servants directly employed by the federal government has declined over the past two decades, a rise in the number of private contractors has offset the decline.

- Read more in the article The Shadow Knows.

- Learn more about The People Factor.

THE PEOPLE FACTOR on GovernmentExecutive.com

On GovernmentExecutive.com, Brian Friel looks at the procedure for evaluating federal employees' performance. He finds that The People Factor offers a number of recommendations on how to improve the appraisals, such as shifting the emphasis from individuals to teams to better reflect today's work environment.

Read the full article.

Take a virtual book tour of "The People Factor"

The Harvard Kennedy School's virtual book tour series provides an in-depth look at The People Factor, including videotaped commentary from co-author Linda J. Bilmes.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/research-publications/vbt/index/bilmes-people-factor

A Human Capital Management Perspective

HR consultant Jon Ingham provides a thoughtful review of The People Factor on his Strategic HCM blog

He writes:

The book includes some nice examples of strategic HR - for example there’s a nice vignette explaining that the Federal Aviation Administration needs to “replace its entire workforce with highly skilled professionals – while at the same time safeguarding public safety and coping with increased air travel” which also describes how the FAA can meet this challenge by recruiting top-calibre candidates more quickly and investing in training (especially in state-of-the art, customised technology for simulating air traffic control) with all of this being supported by better mentoring, performance evaluation, feedback, supervision and a new ability to weed out poor performers early on.

Plus there are longer case studies on the Defence Logistics Agency and the Government Accountability Office.

Read the full review.

Linda Bilmes and W. Scott Gould in 'The Federal Manager'

Investing in the people who make government work

In the Summer 2009 issue of The Federal Manager, Bilmes and Gould discuss how the U.S. can deal with the some of the most serious challenges it has seen in a half century. They argue that overcoming the crisis will require a new and revitalized federal government on a scale and scope not seen for generations.

Read a synopsis of the article [pdf].

What will America do without skilled workers?

The People Factor cited in the Federal Times

“A survey of federal agencies commissioned by Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, discovered that between 1997 and 2000, federal agencies spent about 1.9 percent of their financial payroll on training, while the private sector spends 4 percent and leading organizations even more,” stated a recent article in the Federal Times. With the economic slowdown, there is heightened need for skilled workers in the United States, but with the continuous downsizing of even the wealthiest firms, companies are tempted to downsize their human resources also. But is this truly possible? What repercussions await a great country with workers of little skill? The People Factor: Strengthening America by Investing in Public Service, by former Commerce Department Assistant Secretary Linda Bilmes and W. Scott Gould, deputy secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, addresses the issue.

So what can America do to increase its number of skilled workers? The People Factor argues that the country cannot prosper without a strong, highly functioning federal work force to manage the government. Bilmes and Gould call for a $10 billion investment to improve recruiting, better training and enhanced management of the federal workforce predicting that the investment will yield $300-$600 billion in productivity gains.

In an age where human resources remain the most important factor for global growth, The People Factor urges the nation to invest in its greatest resource—public service.

- Get more information on The People Factor

- Learn about America’s “people factor” in the full article by Tim Kauffman of the Federal Times

What is "The People Factor?"

In the time it takes to watch this video, Federal government agencies will have...

• Solved multiple crimes

• Supervised the safe take-offs and landings of hundreds of airplanes

• Paid food stamps to hungry citizens

• Issued a national weather forecast

• Monitored the skies for any sign of enemy attack

• Rescued struggling ships at sea

• And processed some $50 million in banking transactions.

But after a century of neglect, the cracks are beginning to show. Due to rapid globalization, business has changed and adapted in order to survive. By contrast, the government systems and structures that served an earlier age are still in place. In The People Factor: Strengthening America by Investing in Public Service, Linda J. Bilmes and W. Scott Gould provide a compelling business case for investing in the civil service so that it may better serve the nation. By investing $10 billion to improve recruiting, training and management of the federal workforce, the authors predict that investment will yield $300-$600 billion in productivity gains.

- Watch The People Factor, the video

- Learn more about The People Factor, the book

Tom Palmer's Journal on The People Factor

Tom Palmer, a former reporter and editor for The Boston Globe, interviewed Linda Bilmes and writes about The People Factor on his blog:

About 1.9 million people work for the federal government, and almost half of them will be eligible for retirement in the next five years. Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, says in a new book that the government can look to two agencies in particular to learn how to treat and value workers, and to get the most out of them.

Read the full article at Tom Palmer's Journal.