The Budget's Personnel Priorities

The fiscal 2011 budget proposal unveiled by the White House on Monday identifies several high-priority goals for the Office of Personnel Management over the next two years.

Those goals include recruiting and hiring a top-notch federal workforce, implementing a human resources dashboard to gauge employee satisfaction, expanding telework programs, and implementing new wellness programs, all of which play a huge role in ensuring the government can attract and retain a highly skilled federal IT workforce, particularly given the large number of projected retirements in the coming years.

On hiring reform, the budget laid out plans to ensure that at least 80 percent of federal agencies meet agreed upon targeted improvements to improve hiring managers' satisfaction with applicant quality, improve applicant satisfaction and reduce the time it takes to hire. The hiring plan also aims to increase outreach to veterans and persons with disabilities, improve the diversity of the federal workforce, and improve the timeliness and quality of personnel background investigations.

The White House also laid out plans to construct a human resources dashboard to help the government focus on employee and manager satisfaction with the hiring process and other key metrics of personnel management. Similar to the IT Dashboard implemented by the Office of Management and Budget in June 2009, the HR dashboard will provide senior leaders and managers with a mechanism to have better information on the current status of hiring and other key people issues so agencies can focus on areas that need improvement, the budget states.

The budget also prioritized increasing by 50 percent the number of eligible federal employees who telework by 2011, and proposes funding for worksite wellness demonstration projects that apply best practices from the private sector to the federal workforce.