Dear OPM,

It’s been a great first week getting to know some of you and learning more about much of the great work that is happening at OPM. As I mentioned in our Town Hall, my email, office, and Teams is open for anyone who wants to meet or share any feedback or ideas you have about how best to achieve our goals. I haven’t heard as much as I hoped so far from most of you, but I remain optimistic!

I wanted to take a minute to review the strategic objectives we discussed during the Town Hall. Please do read this – there will be a test later – as it’s critical that we are all on the same page. Ok, no test, but all questions and comments are welcome.

Let’s start with why we are here. OPM’s mission is to create and support a world-class, high performance people culture that enables government employees to deliver the most efficient and highest quality set of services on behalf of the American people.

That’s a mouthful, so let me try and break that down into three core strategic objectives that we should be aligned around – these are in no particular order.
First, we must strive to attract and retain the best and the brightest individuals for the federal government. Simply put, the government does lots of important things on behalf of the American people, and we need great team members who show up to work able to deliver all of those services.

How do we do this?

Everything starts with recruiting – how do we make the process efficient and ensure we cast a wide net to reach all of the talented candidates who want to work on behalf of the American people? We also need to make sure we have a candidate review and evaluation process that helps properly identify the required skills for the job. A clear, merit-based way to evaluate a candidate’s competencies and making it easy for a candidate to get from top of the funnel through the hiring process and onboarded in timely fashion are also key.

Some of this will require us to think creatively about new ways to do this and that we consider whether there are actions we are currently taking that might detract from that experience. I’m sure many of you have lots of ideas on this; I do, but really want to hear from you!

Once we onboard people, we need to have an environment that enables everyone to do their best work everyday and rewards excellence. You’ve probably heard me use the term “performance-based culture” to describe this so let me unpack that a bit more. What does this really mean?

In my experience working across lots of different organizations – admittedly, in the private sector – people accept a job (or stay in a job) for a number of reasons. Of course, there are always some mercenaries who just want to make the most money possible. I think that is a small minority of employees and the government is never going to be able to adequately compete for that pool of talent.

Most people –– work for a company because of some combination of the following:

• They believe in the mission of the company and are optimistic about its ability to achieve the mission;
• They work in an environment that challenges them to learn and to continue to develop their skills;
• They have a clear understanding of what is expected of them – and a clear feedback, accountability, and performance management process that rewards them for performance and helps them course correct if they are on the wrong track;
• They have the ability to innovate and work in an environment that doesn’t create unnecessary obstacles preventing them from doing their best work every day; and
• They work for a manager who cares about their professional development and is committed to helping them achieve their professional goals.

This is what I mean by a performance-based culture. And to be clear, we certainly have elements of this today. But we still have work to do.

Second, we are stewards of American taxpayers’ dollars, so we will strive to deliver the highest quality services with maximum efficiency.

I’m sure you’ve heard the word efficiency more times in the last seven months than you ever dreamed you would! But let me tell you how I think about it. Efficiency doesn’t just mean cutting costs. Rather, it means producing more output (services in our case) per unit of input (our time). It means always asking ourselves – how (and why) are we doing something today; could we do it better; could we use technology to help us improve both quality and cost? And, importantly, efficiency does not mean reduce costs by doing a worse job. It means finding ways to produce the same, or, hopefully better, outcomes by working smarter.

At the risk of geeking out on you, remember your tenth-grade biology class where you learned about the Scientific Method? Here’s the refresher: we develop a hypothesis about something; then we develop and run a test to see if the hypothesis is true; then, we interpret the results and modify our hypothesis based on what we learned. And then we do the whole thing over again; it’s an iterative process until we get to the right answer.

That’s what I would ask all of us to do with respect to our work product. Try new things, test them out and see whether that enables you to do more with less. We won’t get everything right the first time, but that’s ok.

The goal is continuous improvement and to make innovation and efficiency first-class components in everything we do. Can we change the way we do things to make the hiring process more efficient? Can we change the way we manage employee benefits to improve health outcomes and lower the costs of health care for our beneficiaries? Can we improve talent visibility and lower costs by centralizing resources? Can we improve the delivery and lower the cost of retirement services? Can we find ways to make rule-making timelier and more efficient?

Ok, I’ll stop! And apologies if I didn’t mention your favor project. But this list is by no means exhaustive; it’s simply to whet your appetite for thinking about how best we can make OPM the best and most efficient service provider.

Third, we will be a leader in the adoption of AI in our everyday work and, most importantly, we will help ensure that the federal government is prepared for the skills and job implications of a post-AI world.

Nobody knows the future, but one thing is certain: technology will continue to advance. And as it does, it will likely impact our personal and professional lives. AI is one of those advances that we are all living through now.

As with all past technology changes, AI is likely to create all kinds of new jobs that we can’t even imagine today – and, of course, there may be some existing jobs that change as well. Our job is to ensure the federal workforce keeps pace with this inevitable change. We don’t want to be a straggler and wake up five years from now to discover hat we are behind and lacking the talent needed to deliver great, efficient services to the American people.

We won’t let that happen. Rather, let’s make OPM the showcase for how best we can use AI to deliver great, efficient services – and let’s do our part to make sure that all of our partner agencies in the federal government have the skills they will need to do the same. I’m certain there is a lot for us to think about here, but importantly we will not be left behind.

Ok, I think that’s enough for now. I hope everyone has a great week and, if you’re having trouble falling asleep tonight, I recommend re-reading this message.

Thanks,
Scott