• International Student House, Ella Burling Hall
• 1825 R Street NW
• Washington, DC (near DuPont Circle)

Ella Burling Hall is in what was once a 19th century private mansion. FELTG and ISH are working hard to insure the facility is fully ADA compliant. However, renovating older buildings does not always go as planned. If you have an accessibility issue, please let us know at least two weeks in advance of the seminar you will attend so we may insure that appropriate arrangements are in place for you. For more information on Ella Burling Hall, click here.

• MSPB Law Week: February 26, 2010
• Advocacy Week: March 19, 2010
• Specialty Practices Week: April 2, 2010
• EEOC Law Week: April 16, 2010
• FLRA Law Week: May 7, 2010
• Civil Service Institute: May 21, 2010

Substitutions may be made at any time with notice to FELTG, but are limited to one substitute filling in the original registrants’ seminar dates. Untimely cancellations are eligible for credit slips for a future registration, provided notice is given before the start of training, but will not be granted for partial attendance. Credit slips will not be granted for no-shows.

Confirmation is by email only. If you do not receive confirmation within seven days, please call FELTG directly at 508.349.3777. On-line Registrations submitted without valid credit card number and expiration dates, or other incomplete information, are VOID. You may not be admitted to the seminar without your confirmation from FELTG. Capacity is Limited — walk-ins may not be permitted. Cancellations made timely, before given close of business dates, do not incur credit card charges. Attendees may cancel up to 30 days prior to the beginning of the first date of the seminar week without charge, and may substitute another attendee at any time. The seminar fee includes daily refreshments and all handout materials. Lunch is one hour.

Cancellations made timely, before given close of business dates, do not incur credit card charges. Attendees may cancel up to 30 days prior to the beginning of the first date of the seminar week without charge, and may substitute another attendee at any time. The seminar fee includes daily refreshments and all handout materials.

1. Not acting because the employee might file a discrimination complaint or a union grievance – Civil servants by law have the right to challenge significant management actions. That’s part of the price we pay for a federal workforce that works for the people, not for some political ideology or individual manager. Therefore, complaints and grievances are to be accepted as a part of the process, and dealt with in due course. Although a supervisor cannot stop an employee from challenging an action, the supervisor will always win the challenge as long as the procedures are followed and the supervisor is motivated by a legitimate business interest.
2. Over-documenting and over-writing – The more the supervisor puts into a charge, the more the agency will have to prove on appeal. Documentation needs to be specific, but not necessarily extensive. And one witness who saw the employee take the laptop is just as good as 20, as long as that witness is not controverted. So the careful and smart supervisor keeps the disciplinary letters lean with few areas for the employee to attack.
3. Too much or too little pre-action discussion – A supervisor does not need to discuss the possibility of discipline with higher-level management. However, it’s a good idea to do so, to check out the waters and to see if upper management has any special requirements. The prepared supervisor will have at least one sit-down with the next level supervisor to discuss the possibility of a proposed adverse action being issued. At the same time, the second-level supervisor makes a mistake by pre-deciding the proposed action before all the evidence is in, including the employee’s Constitutional right to respond. Good supervisors know to check out concerns before hand, and to avoid the second-level supervisor making a decision prior to all the evidence been in the record.
4. Considering facts beyond those in the proposal letter – The employee has the right to know all the reasons on which the agency is considering implementing an adverse action. If the deciding official (almost always the second-level supervisor) does a separate investigation or otherwise considers facts not in the proposal, then the agency runs a very high risk of losing the case on appeal. If the deciding official cannot honestly say that only matters within the proposal letter were considered (e.g., the employee used to be married to the deciding official’s current husband), then the deciding official needs to “recused” and allow some other management official to make the call.
5. Failing to distinguish between misconduct and unacceptable performance – If the problem is described in the employee’s performance standards, and then the supervisor should implement a Performance Improvement Plan and then utilize unacceptable performance procedures. If the problem is unrelated to the employee’s performance standards, then the supervisor needs to consider progressive discipline, penalty selection factors, and that a higher burden of proof is necessary. Congress has developed two separate sets of procedures to follow depending on this distinction, and the experienced supervisors knows how and when to use each of them.

From an emotional standpoint, taking an adverse action is no walk in the park. However, from a technician’s standpoint, the law is specific and relatively easy to follow, as long as these common mistakes are avoided.

Fresh out of graduate school, I walked into a Navy human resources office that had just been put on notice they were about to be shut down because they had not done the necessary supervisory training.  Since I had a background in teaching adults (if you can call being a graduate assistant “teaching adults”), I was hired on the spot and given 48 hours to develop 80 hours of training.  Had it not been for the mandatory training requirement and the authority of the commission to enforce it, I might well not have been hired and would have been forced to continue my career as an exotic male dancer.

Some days I look back and think the exotic dancing was not such a bad career after all.  But that’s another story.

The requirement for the mandatory supervisory training was done away with in the late 70s soon after passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.  Since then, supervisory training in the federal government has been a real patchwork.  Some agencies provide significant training in the area of supervision, and others do not.  Without the threat of losing the authority to have a human resources office, supervisory training many times takes a backseat.

Just this month, some of that changed.  On December 10, 2010, OPM issued new regulations that mandate supervisory training for all federal supervisors within the first year of appointment, and periodic update training at least once every three years.  The specific topic that must be taught is managing performance: mentoring, improving performance, conducting appraisals, and dealing with unacceptable performance.  This new requirement is the first specific mandate of training since the late 70s.  However, it comes without the enforcement arm that the old Civil Service Commission wielded, and it does not set a minimum amount of training that must be provided.  Theoretically, an agency could feel that it had satisfied this requirement by sending around a one-page e-mail that summarized in a few sentences an overview of these topics.  For whatever reasons, agencies apparently have not been providing this level of training, or OPM would not have felt it necessary to issue the new regulation.  The agency that has not provided this level of training for the past three decades may feel that without an enforcement arm, it will continue to have its supervisors do other things with their time.

Well, if an agency chooses not to provide this training because OPM cannot enforce its regulation, it will be taking a risk. Here’s what will happen. If the agency takes an unacceptable performance action and terminates an employee, on appeal a good employee representative will question the involved management officials as to the training they have had in performance management. When they admit they have not had the mandatory training provided for in 5 CFR 412, a big crack starts to open in the agency’s case. Before an MSPB judge, the crack may or may not be significant, depending on the other factors involved in the case. Before an arbitrator, however, the crack may well be much larger, depending on the arbitrator’s view of fairness and the exact language of the collective bargaining agreement at issue. And as every practitioner knows, Rule One is to have as few cracks in the case as possible.

The text of the changes to the regulations can be found at http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-29480.htm.

The in-house training process starts with a phone call or email from someone who thinks his or her organization might use some training. Those contacts are received in our Boston office (877.30.FELTG, feltg@capecod.net), then routed to me here in San Francisco for follow-up. I usually call the interested individual and talk about the scope of training envisioned and the nature of the audience (attorneys, supervisors, other practitioners), then forward a draft program and agenda I have developed based on that discussion.

Usually, the most defining specification is the number of days of training envisioned. For example, we can teach federal labor law in sessions all the way from a one-hour executive briefing to a five-day intensive course full of mock sessions, quizzes, and other interactive approaches. Our pricing is based on the number of days we present rather than the number of attendees, so the client can get a lot of classroom hours of instruction for a relatively low fee by packing the room to the ceiling with attendees. And for attorneys, that’s a lot of low-priced Continuing Legal Education credits.

The benefit of our coming to you is that we can tweak any presentation so that it is focused and highly relevant to you specific situation. Every practitioner has a different set of training requirements. Unfortunately, open-enrollment seminars by definition have to be broad in scope to provide value for a wide range of participant skill levels and needs. In-house customized sessions give the most value for the expense, tend to cover more relevant material in a shorter period of time, and do not require the expenditure of scarce travel funds.

For example, last year I was presenting a customized seminar for National Park Service supervisors on-site at an NPS Grand Canyon facility. About midway through the morning, I noticed that an older couple, obviously vacationers with cameras around their necks and day bags over their shoulders, had wandered into the back of the room and sat down. They started listening to my presentation on federal employment law. And as I got to the point where I talk about whistleblowers, the older gentlemen took out his note pad and began taking notes. Maybe he thought I was talking about some sort of anti-bear whistle, but he seemed very interested. Unfortunately, one of the participants led them out of the room before I could check out what I was saying that was so note-worthy. That couple might represent an entire group of non-federal employees who would benefit from FELTG on-site presentations.

So if you think we might be able to help you out with your on-site training needs, or you have a few older tourists hanging around your office interested in federal employment law, please give us a call to get the conversation started.