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 2013 annual report released last week, the regulator revealed that after breaking down its diversity goals into 10 specific targets, the agency only hit 40% of them.
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."
The first annual performance goal, "Recruit, hire and retain a larger, more diverse pool of potential candidates and employees" — which included increasing diversity from 2% to 5% at various levels throughout the organization, including among senior staff and adding disabled employees to the ranks — was only achieved in the area of increasing "veteran representation" at the agency, where NCUA hit its target of a 2% increase.
While the agency failed to meet most of those goals, it also did not slip in any of those areas during 2013. Additionally, while it fell short of its goal to boost senior staff diversity by its 5% goal, there were significant gains in that area during 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%.
The second goal, to "enhance communications within the agency vertically and horizontally," was also not met, with the agency looking for a 68% improvement in positive responses to the OPM Employee Viewpoint survey question: "How satisfied are you with the information you receive from management on what's going on in your organization?"
The agency received a 59% positive response rate for 2013, following 65% in 2012 and rates ranging from 41% to 57% during the preceding three years.
The one goal where the agency hit 100% of its marks was to "improve agency succession planning for staff, mid-level managers and senior managers." The agency met both performance metrics it set for itself, including introducing an executive leadership development program, and a 10% increase in the number of employee leadership development programs.
The final goal was "develop and implement a comprehensive, integrated and strategic focus for diversity," in part by using civilian labor force demographic data to benchmark and measure diversity at all staff levels. The indicator for that achievement was to meet or exceed those civilian labor force figures where low participation exists, which the agency did not achieve.
One area where the agency did see significant improvement was in enhancing usage of women- and minority-owned businesses when contracting for goods and services. The NCUA aimed to boost that number by 2%, and sailed past that goal with a 137% increase.
NCUA's 2012 Annual Report noted the regulator "continued to enhance its diversity at the agency in 2012," including approving an agency specific diversity and inclusion strategy.
Executing that plan resulted in slight year-over-year increases in multiple areas, such as a 12% increase in the number of female employees and a 5% uptick in African-Americans.
NCUA's 2014 report to Congress said 14.5% of employees at the agency today are African-American, along with 43.7% female. The former number is static compared to 2012 and a 0.6 percentage-point rise from 2011, while the latter continues a slight decline in women's representation at NCUA, from 45.2% in 2011 and 44.8% in 2012.
NCUA's 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."
