WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2010

KLMNO

THE FEDERAL WORKER

P

rogress in promoting women to the top levels of the federal civil service has

flowed like the mighty Mississippi River in the springtime. Wrong. Lately, it’s been more like a

leaky faucet in Uncle Sam’s kitchen.

Q&A

Getting a handle on the postal truck

James Mills is a Postal Service employee of 23 years who drove

tractor trailers for the mail agency before serving as a driving safety instructor. Jim, as he prefers to be called, has trained more than 1,000 Northern Virginia postal employees on how to safely drive the postal trucks that deliver mail to homes and businesses.

Q

What’s the biggest misconception about driving postal trucks?

A lot of people get confused by sitting on the right-hand side, but basically you’re making all your turns the same if you were sitting on the

left side. They’ve just never driven right-hand drive.

How long does it take for someone to go through driving training?

The first day with me is driver orientation for eight hours. Then a computer-based course for four hours. Then they have a defensive driving course that we use with the National Safety Council. That’s a six-hour course. Then they come back for the skills course and vehicle familiarization, which is another six hours.

The driver safety course only started recently, right?

The defensive driver course started in 2007.

And it’s helped cut accidents by . . .?

A little over 50 percent.

What were the leading causes of accidents?

Our No. 1 accident is backing up. People get relaxed and they

don’t use that mirror system [each truck has seven mirrors instead of a rear window] and they back into things.

The number of people you train has dropped with the wave of staff attrition, right?

As far as remedial training, yes, and new employees. Everybody’s making cuts, and with the new technologies, with machines coming out, it’s taking jobs away. The carriers have less casing time [to sort mail] and more street time. They’ve made route adjustments. Where you might have had 30 carriers, you now have 25 in a station. [The U.S. Postal Service also has proposed cutting Saturday mail deliveries, a move that could cut 40,000 jobs through layoffs and attrition.]

Does that impact morale?

Not really. Most of them have seen it coming. It’s not something

that happened overnight.

What’s the public’s biggest misconception of postal workers?

Carrying mail is a difficult job. It’s mind-consuming: memorization of streets, the houses, how to properly put [the mail] into cases. A lot of the casing time has been cut back through machines. . . . Some people realize that it’s not the job they anticipated. It’s more difficult. It’s really a physical job.

— Ed O’Keefe

washingtonpost.com/federaleye

Watch Jim Mills train reporter Ed O’Keefe on how to drive a postal truck.

river before a dam. Between 2006 and 2009, the

proportion of women in SES barley moved, from 28.7 percent to 29.9 percent. “Increasing the ranks of women in the SES less than one percentage point every two years is absolutely unacceptable,” FEW says with an understandable sense of indignation. Though FEW is upset with the

federal government, it has good things to say about the White House and the Office of Personnel Management under President Obama. The White House Council on

Women and Girls and OPM have been “very, very receptive,” said Janet Kopenhaver, FEW’s Washington representative. Christine M. Griffin, OPM’s

deputy director, said her office and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, her former agency, are working to “ensure that federal agencies remove all remaining barriers to women’s advancement in SES and senior pay levels.” But having allies in the White

House and at OPM doesn’t mean the problems have disappeared. FEW provides some solutions. At the top of the list is training. By far, FEW says, its “members cite the lack of training and cross-training as a major impediment to women moving

While men and women are close to being equally represented in the lower grades of the federal workforce, “at the higher levels women are woefully falling short of their male counterparts,” says a new report by the group Federally Employed Women, appropriately referred to as FEW. Between 1992 and 2003, women were breaking through the glass ceiling at a pretty good clip, more than doubling their participation in the government’s Senior Executive Service from 12.3 percent to 26.2 percent, according to numbers FEW took from Office of Personnel Management reports. But then things slowed like a

FEDERAL DIARY

Joe Davidson

into the top levels of the federal government.” FEW has sponsored its own national training program, even as it has watched the government’s training budget fall. “Training dollars have shrunk to truly unbelievably low levels over the last couple of years,” according to the report. “When funding is tight, training is one of the first things cut, and yet it critically impacts the quality of our federal workforce.” Everyone knows mentoring is

a key element in helping individuals advance, yet the lack of women in the upper ranks presents a Catch-22

predicament.

“Managers and supervisors need to be held

accountable for diversity in their agencies.”

— Report on employment ratios in top civil service jobs, Federally Employed Women

“Obviously because there are far fewer female SES and high ranking employees in the federal government, our mentor pool is much smaller than that of men,” FEW said. FEW’s solution:

Develop a formal mentoring program for women. The organization says establishing and participating in a mentoring program should be part of the performance

requirements for both supervisors and staff. What FEW advocates is basic

good management. There’s one crucial factor that FEW mentions briefly, but without the elaboration it deserves: “Managers and supervisors need to be held accountable for diversity in their agencies.” This is true for the hiring and advancement of women, African Americans, Latinos, the disabled and other groups that are underrepresented at the boss level in government, newspapers and throughout American society. Unless managers are held

responsible for creating a thoroughly diverse

workplace, the kind of tepid movement that women have recently experienced with the SES will be the norm. There is a

government program, the Federal Women’s

Janet Kopenhaver of FEW has been working with a White House council and the Office of Personnel Management.

S

B3

Women’s gains have slowed at top of civil service

Program, that’s designed to encourage the hiring and advancement of women in the federal government, but it’s just about useless, according to FEW. FEW said it “is very concerned

that since FWP’s inception . . . the effectiveness of FWPs has gradually eroded to the point of almost non-existence where many agencies do not even comply with reporting requirements with respect to these programs.” Under the program, federal

agencies appoint FWP managers, who work with the agencies to bolster the number and status of women. But the program apparently is so ineffective that an OPM document with instructions to managers, which required them to develop plans of action and submit progress reports, cannot be found. “I searched for the

instructional language and I couldn’t find it,” Kopenhaver said.

FEW wants the administration to issue new orders that tell agencies they must outline the requirements of the women’s programs and the support they are to receive, specify the responsibilities of the programs’ managers and make public agency progress reports and their plans of action. Sounds like a plan to me.

federaldiary@washpost.com

An uneven field

Training and mentoring are keys to increasing management diversity in federal civil service jobs, according to a new report.

Total civilian federal employment

● Men ● Women

1.13 1.03

million

56%

million

56%

824,033

44%

901,838

44%

2005 2007 2009

Senior executive service

● Men ● Women

5,159

73%

5,339

69%

1,948

27%

2005 2007 2009

NOTE: Figures are rounded.

SOURCES: Federally Employed Women; www.fedscope.opm.gov

THE WASHINGTON POST

2,373

31%

SUSAN DYER

on washington post.com

What are the top three qualities you think a federal manager must have to be a successful leader in the

federal workforce?

JOE O’KEEFE

James Mills has trained more than 1,000 mail truck drivers.

federaleye@washingtonpost.com and include your full name, home town and — if you are a federal worker — the agency for which you work. Your answers might be used in Friday’s Washington Post.

Obama slow to fill

seats for judges

As of the Senate’s return Monday, President Obama will have officially nominated 56 judges for the federal district and appeals courts (not counting one for the Supreme Court), according to Capitol Hill data. That’s fewer than either Bill Clinton (77) or George W. Bush (98) had in mid-April of their second years.

If at first you don’t

succeed . . .

The U.S. Census will send duplicate forms to addresses that were slow to respond in the 2000 survey in hopes of getting more responses for 2010.

The Fed Page, A15

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