A Personnel Challenge At DHS

At the Department of Homeland Security, Marta Brito Perez works 12-hour days looking for ways to move the personnel practices of a mega-bureaucracy closer to those of a Fortune 500 company.

"You want people to see things the way you see them," she said. "Is it easy all the time? No. Is it worth the challenge? Yes."

Perez knows about challenges. She was born in Cuba and came to Rockville with her family in 1968, when she was 14. Her father had owned a printing shop, and her mother was a math professor. The family's move, which was four years in the making, was sponsored by a Methodist church in Rockville.

At Homeland Security, where her title is chief human capital officer, Perez wants to improve recruitment, speed up hiring, rotate executives through the department to broaden their leadership potential, and get moving on a new pay-for-performance system that has stalled because of a court fight with unions and funding cuts on Capitol Hill.

She has to sell many of her policy changes to personnel directors in the 22 agencies that were merged to form Homeland Security. Creating a Team DHS also means turning around morale and reassuring 180,000 employees that they will have opportunities to advance their careers.

In a survey released in 2005, employees gave the department low marks on leadership, innovation and fairness. The department's score was next to last among the 30 agencies surveyed.

Perez sees the department's employees as vital to the department's success -- a refrain often heard in federal personnel offices. "People pay lip service to that" she said. "I happen to believe it."

She also is counting on her experience with unions to soften workplace friction. She worked for eight years as director of human resources for the Montgomery County government, conducting labor negotiations, and implementing a pay system designed to help the county recruit and retain middle and senior managers.

When she took the county post, relations with unions were at a low point; Perez turned them around, said Douglas M. Duncan, who was county executive at the time. "She is very bright and a quick study, and she does work very well with others," he said.

John Sparks, president of the Montgomery County Career Fire Fighters Association, said Perez "seemed to have a true appreciation for working families, was very forthright and never misleading." Gino Renne, president of the public employee union UFCW Local 1994, said he "enjoyed a very productive, collaborative relationship" with Perez.

Before her stint in Montgomery County, Perez spent 17 years as a manager at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a nonprofit group in Northern Virginia, where she led training programs.

Perez jumped from county government to the federal sector in 2002, when Bush administration officials recruited her to work at the Office of Personnel Management. She took a top policy job and helped create new standards for managing the government's 1.8 million civil service employees.

Last year, White House officials asked Perez to move to Homeland Security, an offer she said she could not resist because of her long interest in law enforcement. Perez earned a bachelor's degree in criminology at the University of Maryland and has a master's in organization development and human resources from Johns Hopkins.

Perez is the third person to serve as the department's personnel chief. Congress created the position in 2002 at large agencies in an attempt to improve personnel management.

Perez said she hoped to create a workplace in which "managers have the opportunity to communicate expectations and employees know exactly what is expected of them."

One of the most pressing issues Perez must deal with involves redrafting department rules that were intended to limit the number of issues that unions could negotiate, and to scale back other labor rights. Federal unions went to court and blocked the changes; the department must provide a status report on any next steps to a federal judge by mid-July.

Perez also wants to make the department more competitive in hiring and keeping talented young professionals. "The private sector invests in making their organizations attractive so that people want to work there," she said. "The government traditionally doesn't do that. They just assume people are going to flock and come and want to work. People may, but it may not be the right people."

Although her job requires long-term strategic planning skills, Perez acknowledged that she never really plotted a career path for herself. "My dad always said you work hard at what you are doing and the rest will work itself out," she said.

Stephen Barr's e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.