Interior aims to improve workforce diversity

The Interior Department is changing its workforce plans and performance appraisals to reemphasize diversity after an employee group raised concerns in a report about the department's hiring and treatment of African-American workers.

"The entire Department of the Interior leadership team is acutely aware of the diversity challenges facing the department, including the long history of managing workforce diversity as a discretionary activity," said Julie Rodriguez, Interior's deputy press secretary.

Some issues Interior intends to address were the subject of an August 2009 town hall meeting held by the department's chapters of Blacks in Government, an employee affinity group. In a report on that meeting, Blacks in Government said statistics on African-American representation in the department and anecdotal evidence of an environment that did not promote or develop black employees prompted the group's concerns about workforce issues at Interior.

Interior received the report in October 2009, and BIG released it publicly on Jan. 18, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Between 2002 and 2008, the Office of Personnel Management identified Interior as the only Cabinet-level department that did not employ as many African-Americans as the private sector did in similar occupations. In 2008, only 5.7 percent of Interior's workforce was African-American, even though black workers made up 9.2 percent of the relevant overall private sector workforce. And African-American employees received only 5 percent of the department's performance awards in 2009.

"This personnel crisis has steadily eroded, at best, well-intended improvements," Blacks in Government wrote in its report. Kim Lambert, president of the Interior Department chapter of BIG, said the report was an expression of "the tremendous frustration we have felt for the past decade."

Rodriguez said Interior has taken a number of steps to remedy underrepresentation of African-American employees, including adopting some recommendations from Blacks in Government. Robert Stanton, a former National Park Service director appointed in May as Interior's deputy assistant secretary for policy, management and budget also will be the department's point person on workforce diversity.

Following the recommendations from Blacks in Government, Interior is developing a diversity advocacy element that will be part of the department executives' performance evaluations, establishing a mentoring program to help new hires acclimate more quickly, and working to improve its hiring outreach to students in historically disadvantaged communities as well as programs to move interns into full-time jobs.

Interior also is drawing up a strategic plan and implementing eVersity, a software system that will make it easier to track workforce demographics and generate reports on the impact of the department's diversity efforts. Rodriguez said Interior had noticed a spike in requests for diversity training from department managers, and individuals and organizations had volunteered to act as models for good diversity practices.

"One reality in the department is that over the next seven years, 40 percent of our workforce will change because they will retire," Rodriguez said. "We see this as a great opportunity to recruit people with diverse backgrounds and to ensure an inclusive workforce."