Justice employees win competition for their jobs

Open communications were key to maintaining a productive environment throughout an 18-month public-private competition for grants management services that ended last month in a win for the federal employee team, a senior Justice Department official said in a recent interview.

The Office of Justice Programs competition, which was carried out under the Office of Management and Budget's Circular A-76 rules governing standard contests, was launched in August 2004 and involved 80 full-time equivalent positions in grants management support services, ranging from administrative support to grants oversight and management.

The award to the employee bidders, organized into a group termed a "most efficient organization," was announced in early February. The winning proposal involved downsizing to 66 full-time jobs.

OJP Assistant Attorney General Regina Schofield, who stepped into her position in June 2005, said that when she arrived, employees were nervous about the competition under way and many expected to lose their jobs. Communication helped ease those fears, and made the process less difficult for the affected employees, she said in an interview with Government Executive last week.

"I think the communication channels that we've been able to use have really enhanced our ability to share information with our employees," Schofield said. "We had a page about [the competition] on our [intranet] portal and lots of meetings, so no one felt as if we were withholding information from them."

"Once you start communicating with people…you find that some easy questions really haven't been answered and you can answer them right away," Schofield said, adding, "otherwise, people answer their own questions, and innuendos and gossip get out there and people think they're the truth."

Schofield said a "very productive relationship" with the union representing the affected employees also helped in managing the competition process. Stuart Smith, who wears an unusual pairing of hats as both president of the OJP employees' union branch and public affairs specialist in the agency's Office of Communications, said Schofield had pledged to the unions to make the process "as easy for the employees as possible," meeting with them several times during the competition.

The agency applied what it termed a "hiring frost" last year that postponed filling one position so that an affected employee could apply for it, and 10 employees opted for early retirement, Schofield said. With the successful MEO bid reducing OJP's grants workforce by 14 full-time positions, she said she hopes another three or four employees will opt for early retirement to prevent the need for a reduction in force.

Governmentwide, employee groups have won the majority of public-private competitions -- OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy has reported that 80 percent to 90 percent of competitions are won by in-house teams.

Schofield credited the high in-house success rate to the "incredible creativity" of government employees. "When they look at a process and are allowed input into it …they have a lot of ideas about how to improve the process," she said. "And that results in MEOs winning."