Federal Employee Salaries Grew 4.7% Last Year
federal salaries grew by 4.7 percent last year.
Human Resources
When it Comes to Inclusion, The CIA is MIA
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States commonly known as the 9/11 Commission, concluded that a piece of the systematic failure to prevent the terrorist attacks on September 9, 2011 was rooted in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) lack of inclusion. When the commission spoke about inclusion, they did not mean inclusionRead… Read more »
TSP Funds End First Half of 2015 With Gains
There have been no any major gains or losses in the TSP funds so far this year, and June was in fact slightly dismal with all the funds showing small losses except for the G Fund which managed to squeak through the month with a 0.17 percent gain.
One More Symbol to Wipe Out
The Nazi flag has been designated to the landfill of history. The Confederate flag is about to come down in South Carolina. Unfortunately, one flag still flies high in our nation’s capital, the flag of the Washington R-Word, an emblem of suffering, shame and racism to indigenous people in the USA. During the Confederate flagRead… Read more »
STEM vs Humanities: Why Both are Needed for Analytics
A national conversation is continuing to brew over whether Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) skills should be emphasized in schools and universities over humanities and liberal arts education. Several recent studies have found that the perceived higher marketplace value of STEM skills has led to a drop in the percentage of students pursuing humanitiesRead… Read more »
Breaking the Glass Ceiling in Local Government
There’s been a lot of attention paid lately to the 13 percent statistic: the portion of chief administrative officers in local governments that are women stands at 13 percent, roughly the same figure it was in the 1980s. It’s an important issue, and a complicated one, and I asked my colleague Jan Perkins for someRead… Read more »
Hiring Social Media and Digital Expertise: A Hierarchy
Although social media can no longer be considered a novelty, many organizations (especially small- and mid-sized groups) are still trying to figure out whether and how to leverage it as part of their marketing, branding, public relations, customer service, and revenue-generating efforts. In conjunction with those determinations, they must also figure out the best approachesRead… Read more »
Love Is in the Air: When Couples Are Colleagues
“At meetings, we try to sit as far apart from each other as possible,” Jim, who is married to one of my other colleagues, Sue, told me. “In the office, people assume when they are talking to one of us they’re talking to both of us, but we make a point to act like anyRead… Read more »
Fake It Till You Make It
The resignation of Rachel Dolezal as president of the Spokane, WA National Association of the Advancement of Colored People has dominated the news lately. Ms. Dolezal had been using a fake racial identity by leading a chapter of the largest advocacy group in the country for African Americans as a mixed race person even thoughRead… Read more »
The Secret to Good Government
Could the federal government’s COOs be managing agencies better? Ron Sanders, Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton and the firm’s first fellow, sought to answer this question. In collaboration with the Partnership for Public Service, he and his company surveyed federal COOs to pinpoint the problems that COOs across the public sector frequently encounter inRead… Read more »