U.S. Federal Railroad Administration:
Assurring Peak Performance® through workforce planning

The Challenge

The safety inspection workforce of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) consists of a special breed of professionals. Before they became federal employees, they learned about railroads by working for railroads. These are people who love the challenge of ensuring railroad safety, an essential element of a strong and vibrant rail industry. They’ve honed their skills over the years, inspecting railroad signals, track, locomotive power systems, operating practices and hazardous material transportation practices.

The time is near, however, when more than 50 percent of this specialized workforce can retire, taking its invaluable skills and experience with it. While no individual is irreplaceable, the collective knowledge and experience of this group will take years to re-create if large-scale retirements happen in a short period of time. This poses a direct threat to FRA operating at Peak Performance®.

Facing tight budgets, FRA leadership could easily have ignored this pending problem, hoping it would just go away. Instead, it tackled the issue head on – with SiloSmashers.

The Path to a Solution

Taking bold action, FRA leadership decided to become an early adopter of human capital management by implementing a multi-year workforce planning initiative. From the start, the SiloSmashers team was acutely aware of the impact workforce planning could have on the safety of those who work for or use railroads. There was no room for error. Workforce planning would also affect the ability of FRA to achieve its mission and the way its people do their jobs. We knew that gaining the buy-in and commitment of FRA leaders was critical to the initiative’s success.

The SiloSmashers team applied a five-step workforce planning methodology:

• Become familiar with the function/job family and its relationship to FRA goals
• Interview key managers and staff to determine future needs, performance gaps and current training and development approaches
• Develop a list of competencies, perform gap analyses, generate strategies and report findings and recommendations
• Discuss the findings with stakeholders
• Prepare the final report

For the FRA Office of Safety, we experienced a “day in the life” of railroad safety inspectors – climbing aboard hazardous material cars, walking and riding with track and signal inspectors and observing them as they conducted operating practice reviews. As a result, our team was able to develop a comprehensive workforce development model for safety inspectors, including specific strategies for addressing skill gaps, re-aligning skills to match job standards and recruiting to achieve diversity goals. An off-shoot of the work was a knowledge management project that enabled the Office of Safety to capture the knowledge of experienced railroad inspectors – and use it to improve organizational performance.

Subsequently, our team analyzed other FRA organi-zations, tailoring our methodology to each one’s needs and serving as a catalyst for organizational change. For the Office of Policy, we helped determine its future size and what skills would be needed to best meet its evolving mission. We also developed strategies to help other offices meet a range of challenges – from addressing declining workloads to devising a systematic, mission-related approach to employee training.

The Results of Peak Performance®

Through our collaboration with FRA, SiloSmashers identified areas where current employees need additional training, coaching or mentoring and also helped them prepare for the future by writing job announcements that more accurately reflected their needs. By setting clear, concrete performance stan-dards, FRA adopted a systematic approach to evalu-ating and quantifying the effectiveness of its staff.

Today, when high-performing employees retire or move on with their careers, their expertise isn’t lost. Through the pilot knowl-edge management program developed as a result of workforce planning, it’s now passed on to their replacements. This eliminates gaps in service and reduces the amount of time needed to bring new employees up to speed.

Applying our proven experience in organ-izational change, FRA headed off a major management challenge that put Peak Performance® at risk. SiloSmashers helped the agency conduct business more effectively, assuring that the skill sets to support its evolving mission will be available in the years ahead.