ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The NCUA remains committed to workforce diversity as a key to success for the organization, despite the agency failing to meet 60% of its own workplace target goals last year.
In its
NCUA spokesman John Fairbanks told Credit Union Journal in an e-mail that the agency views these targets as "a measure in time, not of success or failure, but as an indicator of where we need to focus our additional efforts. If we fall below a particular measure, we want to know why, and what we can do to improve that performance."
And while the organization didn't meet the majority of its target goals last year, there was progress on many fronts.
For instance, though NCUA fell short of its goal to boost senior staff diversity by 5% (with just a 2% increase in this figure), there were significant gains in this area in 2011 and 2012, rising each year by 7% and 8%, respectively. Those gains were even more significant given that in 2010 NCUA's senior staff diversity dropped by 7%.
Similarly, NCUA also did not meet its goal of enhancing communication horizontally and vertically across the organization — as measured by a 68% improvement in positive responses to the OPM Employee Viewpoint survey question of: "How satisfied are you with the information you receive from management on what's going on in your organization?"
The agency did receive a positive response rate of 59%, though that figure was still down from a 65% positive response rate in 2012 and rates ranging from 41% to 57% during the preceding three years.
NCUA measured significant improvement in its goal to enhance the usage of women- and minority-owned businesses when contracting for goods and services last year. The agency aimed to boost that number by 2%, but vastly exceeded that goal with a 137% increase.
Making Strides
Fairbanks also noted that the agency's most recent report to Congress found that minorities collectively totaled 26.8% of the agency's workforce in 2013, a 1.6 percentage-point increase from 2011, NCUA's benchmark year.
"While this trend is positive, we want to make sure it continues to grow," Fairbanks said. "Consequently, during 2013, we increased our vacancy distribution list to more than 550 minority-serving organizations, actively support a presence on social media and engage in strategic partnerships with diverse professional organizations serving minorities and women. Progress from these activities will take time to mature, influenced by factors such as new hires for vacancies and demographics for persons separating from the agency. We anticipate, however, that this progress towards workforce diversity will continue."
