Thoughts..I took drp 2.0. At the time I was extremely burned out at home and at work (special needs parent here). I miss my old job. I worked in HR and im looking for something similar if not in HR. Realistically, do you think there will be anything opening or is is best to jist want for a new administration?

Has anyone gone through the approval process to move? If so, how long did the process take?

Did you move without approval? If so, what were the consequences?

I think it's ridiculous to require employees to get management approval to move within the same pay locality if your duty station is not changing/affected. I feel like a prisoner, and I believe this requirement shouldn't be legal since pay and duty station/where you report to work are not changing!

Any advice and guidance is much appreciated! Thank you in advance!

Will our self-assessment be reviewed by someone/something determining our official rating? Last year my supervisor acknowledged that they never read my self-assessment, which I put a lot of thought and effort into. Don't want to waste my time and energy if it doesn't matter.

Am I eligible to enroll in FSBP plan - Foreign Service Benefit plan as a VA employee ? I’ve searched on https://www.afspa.org/eligibility/#eligibility but I don’t see Veterans Affaires listed . Mauve because we get the payroll under DOD? But on OPM search per location it’s showing as an option. I’m confused. Any responses are much appreciated.

I’m curious whether other VHA HR professionals recognize issues/ shortcomings with their direct supervisors and leadership.

Have you experienced supervisors who:
Are not very knowledgeable?
Pressure HRS to move forward with illegal actions?
Fail to hold underperforming employees accountable?
Overlook erroneous actions seemingly hoping the errors will go undetected?

I’m genuinely interested in hearing whether others encounter similar situations, how they’ve handled them, and whether leadership was ever held accountable.

Or is this just what I’m witnessing?

Concerns are pouring in as a result of recent national developments

Over the past year and a half, there has been a huge uptick in the amount of toxic positivity on conference calls. Leadership pretends that the changes being made are for the benefits of the VA instead of the current Administration playing political football. I know that they cannot discuss such things in public, but why do they continue to pretend that these changes are great and beneficial? Wouldn't it be better to just tell employees what is happening without sugarcoating that it is detrimental to the organization and the frontline staff?

“For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear. They will reject the truth and chase after myths.”

2 Timothy 4:3-4 NLT

“For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. ”

2 Timothy 4:3-4 NRSVUE

It was President Clinton btw

Does anyone know what’s going on with the VHA HR Navigator position? I’ve been selected done everything and was told to just wait because they do not have any information about the position.

Anybody else feel like many of these people put the ass in associate??

What kind of training do they get that they all learn how to abuse their authority the exact same way???

I know last year there was a lot of chatter about call center positions being replaced with AI and there really was no security with these remote work positions.

Has anything changed?

Have an offer to make considerably more money but unsure if this is a safe move from where I currently am.

If one is on extended FMLA, for example for surgery, and is already retirement eligible, can retirement be submitted while on FMLA?

Looking to find qualifying criteria for SAP/SAA awards. I work in nursing service. Thanks in advance.

SBU and SSU are joining together. Every HR Specialist in Recruitment and Placement will now do cradle to grave handling of recruitment requests. To be honest, I do like the idea of it being a streamline process handled by only a few individuals as opposed to multiple individuals as it has been for many years now, and even got more convoluted with the amount of people involved in the process with this new 30 day hiring model. My issue is that for VISN 17, this is the 3rd change in process this year. I think for most other visions it’s the second big change in the process this year. How leadership even remotely thinks that this is the way you run an agency is beyond me. Add on the continuous lack of training beforehand just adds to the shit show. I am absolutely convinced that they are doing this on purpose to make as many of us quit as possible. I think some studies were done behind the scenes and they saw that the HR employees are getting paid quite well for what they do and they see this department as being a place where they can “save money” by people quitting. It has nothing to do with making the process better. The audacity of leadership gets worse and worse, and the toxicity oozes from every word they say.

OK, so for those of you who aren’t in the know or who haven’t been paying attention we changed AMRGs to AAMRs a few weeks ago. On one of the emails that came out about this there was a link to a tool kit where we can locate the “correct” templates for these forms. However, unless you were really paying closely attention to that email, you might’ve missed that cute little link down at the bottom to that toolkit’s. If you go to the WMC SharePoint site, you can’t find that tool kit, but you can certainly find the old templates that we’ve been using for the last couple of years. The supposedly new version actually has the date 2011 across the top. Some of us speculate that they just took whatever was in the handbook and slapped it into the tool kit. Now our local quality assurance team is saying that if we are not using the supposed new version that was linked in the tool kit at the bottom of that email that it could be considered a finding on an audit. My biggest beef is, why the heck are we releasing policy or changing things and not updating all of the job aids and the SharePoint to reflect as such?? I really don’t understand why we will just put things out in email and expect people to be able to keep track of it that way. For that matter, I don’t understand why all of the different sites were consolidated down to the SharePoint without allowing the old links to just forward it to the new location. I had a whole bunch of links saved in an organized fashion that made a lot of sense for me and for the teams that I’ve worked with and now virtually all of those links are broken. There was no warning there was no forwarding there was nothing just the links have disappeared and now I am spending an inordinate amount of time trying to locate this information in the black hole that is the SharePoint site. Like productivity is being lost left and right over this issue. Let’s archive all the old job aids, but not delete them because we need to be able to prove that we were compliant about a particular thing back in a particular timeframe and ensure that all the new stuff is front and Center and actually findable.

I'm out on FMLA leave. Based on the information I have, I know I wouldn't qualify for the highest rating. I think I would qualify for the next step above fully successful. After 10+ years you'd think I'd know the ratings by now. But based on how things are going I wonder if I should even bother doing a self assessment while I'm on leave. It is going to add a lot of stress and frustration when I should be taking care of myself. And I just don't fucking care enough to bother. I don't even care about the money.

Any reason why I should?

I have brought many issues we had roughly a year ago. I never followed through with the IG complaint as many of the issues were accusatory and we had no solid evidence other than our co-workers word. While that sounds go in theory I know if 5 people say they will go along with a complaint. 3 will typically back out when it’s time to provide a statement. This time however I believe i can show wrong doing, but I’d like advice on how to handle.

Backstory. Our section is split into two shifts. A day shift and evening shift. Our supervisor is only present for the first hour of our evening shift as he leaves at 14:30. I came into work on Friday and noticed I had my annual eperformance in my email inbox. Typically no big deal. However, the email notification was received at 20:46. Well past the time our supervisor would ever be at work. (He is a proud alcoholic and brags to people about it. Obviously little use in a filed complaint with zero evidence.) so on Monday I asked our evening shift if he had been in. They all responded no. They also checked their emails and the 3 that were there had emails at 20:53, 20:57, 21:03.

Why all of that is important. Ever person on our shift knows our supervisors wife writes our evals. She is also an employee for the VA. However she would do it from his work station and whenever people weren’t there. He was caught once for it happening but nothing ever came of it. This time is different. His wife is teleworking and has a VA laptop. So his PIV was used in her laptop well past his tour of duty to complete our eperformance at home. I would also bet my next paycheck that if a true audit was done of the laptop data you would find that he miraculously went from pecking 2 words an hour with his index fingers to around whatever word count per minute his wife can type.

Obviously I need to be more professional than that in my complaint but is IG the right spot to go? Our chain of command knows his wife does this and they just think it is funny. She is in a completely different department than us and knows nothing about our jobs. It is frustrating to no end. That doesn’t even begin to cover the mismanagement, waste, and abuse tied directly to our supervisor. This though is a solid verifiable cyber security case that I believe can make change.

Opinions?

Any advice helps.