Austerity: IT Workforce Edition

Agencies across the board are trying to do more with less. At the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, part of that strategy involves focusing on people and rightsizing the workforce.

Patrick Howard, chief information security officer at NRC, told Wired Workplace on Monday that his office is following an agencywide initiative to rightsize the workforce and reduce the amount the agency is spending on payrolls. This includes an effort to evaluate and re-grade employee positions across the agency. "Over the years, the [pay] grades have crept up as you typically see in any government agency," he said.

The effort also includes evaluating the numbers and roles of managers across the agency. The goal, Howard said, is to reach the governmentwide average of about 10 employees per manager and to reduce the number of nonsupervisory GS-15 employees.

The goal is rightsizing the workforce without having any layoffs, and Howard said his office is working hard to make the process as transparent as possible for employees. NRC is consistently rated by its employees each year as one of the top places to work in the Partnership for Public Service rankings, so Howard said he hopes the restructuring will not have a negative impact on morale, particularly for the highly-skilled, in-demand cybersecurity workers in his office.

"The situation with IT security professionals -- they're very much in demand," Howard said. "If we don't get this right and employee morale is negatively impacted, then we could lose highly capable and skilled IT professionals to other agencies or other companies in the private sector."

Howard said his office is also creating a central clearinghouse that provides visibility for all of his office's resources and the demands being placed on it. "Having that dashboard and that view of all the different requirements that are coming helps you plan for them better and provides you with the appropriate response when you're not having to just say, 'no,' but you're able to say, 'not now,'" he said. "The whole idea is to prioritize and evaluate in a common way."