tailieunhanh - Ensuring Successful Personnel Management In The Department Of Homeland Security

The new Department of Homeland Security will be faced with the challenge of implementing and further improving the human resources (HR) system agreed upon by the President and Congress. To help meet the challenge, this Issue Paper draws from management and economics studies to identify the characteristics that make the HR system in any organization effective. It finds that existing civil service f | Issue Paper RAND National Security Research Division Ensuring Successful Personnel Management in the Department of Homeland Security Beth J. Asch SUMMARY Notwithstanding the debate in recent months between the Bush administration and members of Congress about how personnel should be managed in the Department of Homeland Security DHS the secretary of the new department will be faced with the challenge of implementing and further improving the human resources HR system agreed upon by the President and Congress. This challenge will be made more complex by the need to integrate federal employees who previously worked in other federal organizations and the need to reshape the skill mix of these employees to suit the new mission being given to the DHS. It will also be made more complex by the need to recruit a large number of new workers to replace the wave of retirements projected to occur over the next decade and that cannot be handled by outsourcing positions. To provide input to help meet the challenge this paper draws from management and economics studies to identify the characteristics that make the HR system in any organization effective. It presents evidence on where the civil service system falls short in terms of these characteristics how these shortcomings have affected personnel outcomes in the past and past efforts to improve the civil service system. It concludes with suggestions for steps that could be taken by policymakers to bolster personnel management in the DHS. Successful personnel management requires flexible compensation and personnel management tools that provide performance incentives for both workers and managers recruitment and retention incentives for talented personnel managerial discretion and accountability the assurance of adequate resources to implement these policies transparency and oversight stability and limited financial risk to workers. The civil service system contains some but not all of these characteristics. One of the main ways