Personnel action requests (PAR) are fundamental to managing the Federal workforce, governing every significant change to an employee’s status. But the systems supporting these actions are often disjointed, outdated, and heavily manual – complicating compliance, reducing transparency, and hindering efficiency. As workforce and efficiency demands grow, modernizing this core function is more than a nice-to-have: It’s essential.
MeriTalk recently sat down with Annamary Holbrook, director of federal solutions consulting at Workday, a provider of human capital and financial management system software, to discuss how agencies can rethink PAR processing with modern tools, configurable workflows, and real-time analytics to improve mission delivery, employee engagement, and operational resilience.
MeriTalk: What are the biggest challenges that affect processing PARs in Federal agencies today?
Holbrook: PARs cover every HR transaction – from hiring to compensation changes to retirements – but the systems used to manage them are frequently outdated or pieced together. If you ask HR leaders in Federal agencies, 75 percent say they don’t have accurate information. They’re often managing data in multiple systems that don’t talk to each other, so they have to make sure the systems are in sync – and half the time they’re still doing a lot of this work manually. There’s rarely a seamless, integrated experience from initiation to completion.
MeriTalk: How do these challenges impact mission delivery and workforce engagement in the Federal environment?
Holbrook: Agencies can’t answer basic questions like, “How many people do we have?” or “What kinds of work are they doing?” They don’t have accurate, centralized data. IT is scrambling to pull it from different places, and some agencies are still trying to manage the data in manual spreadsheets. One agency we worked with couldn’t identify employees with cybersecurity skills when they needed to form a response team. If you don’t understand your workforce, you can’t align it with the mission. That gap makes agencies slower to respond and undermines employee confidence and engagement.
MeriTalk: How are Federal HR leaders rethinking PAR processing in light of the administration’s mandate for greater efficiency?
Holbrook: Some have implemented point solutions or custom workflows, but those are often just overlays on legacy systems. They don’t truly integrate, which means manual updates are still needed to get information into the system of record – especially for payroll. The most forward-thinking leaders are looking for platforms that are purpose-built for Federal, with PAR functionality embedded from the start. They want self-service, validation rules, and transparency across the entire workflow. And they want to stop reinventing the wheel every time they upgrade or change something.
MeriTalk: In what ways can configurable workflows and business process automation help streamline PAR processing?
Holbrook: They’re critical. Federal PARs involve conditionality based on worker type, funding, location, and more. Business process automation enables agencies to configure workflows based on those conditions and embed routing, approvals, and notifications directly into the system. As a result, 90 percent of PARs are standardized. The remaining 10 percent have special conditions. In the past, those would have been handled in emails – taking those actions outside of the audit trail. But when agencies can handle those exceptions inside a configurable system, every action stays within the system, and audit trails are preserved.
MeriTalk: How do analytics and real-time dashboards help improve oversight and decision-making for HR actions?
Holbrook: Today, most leaders feel like they spend half their time compiling data. When PARs are handled in a system of record that’s fully auditable, data is at their fingertips – and they trust it. HR leaders can answer questions like: “How many PARs have we done? What are the cycle times? Where are the bottlenecks?” They can also see workforce gaps, succession risks, and skill shortages in real time. The data gives them the confidence to be strategic and proactive, not just reactive.
MeriTalk: How can Federal HR teams ensure that automation and data handling in PAR workflows maintain compliance with Office of Personnel Management (OPM) requirements and protect employee data?
Holbrook: You need a system designed for PARs and Federal compliance. If you’re using email or manually customizing commercial tools, you’re introducing risk and losing auditability. Workday, for example, embeds role-based security and zero-trust architecture from the start. Our approach ensures that only authorized users access sensitive data, and every action is tracked. We use the OPM data model as the foundation and build in the logic for nature of action (NOA) codes, legal authorities, and valid combinations to minimize errors and rework.
MeriTalk: How does Workday’s business process framework support flexible, secure, and auditable PAR workflows in Federal environments?
Holbrook: Workday treats business processes as core infrastructure. Thousands of workflows are available out of the box, and agencies can configure them for their specific needs while staying within OPM guidelines. We track every step and every approver. Agencies can see who did what and when, and they can pinpoint delays. That helps with everything from 80-day hiring goals to leadership gap analysis. It also means they can evolve processes over time without losing historical data or audit trails.
MeriTalk: What capabilities does Workday bring to Federal agencies seeking to reduce administrative overhead?
Holbrook: We offer granular control so business users – not just IT – can update processes and adapt to changing requirements inside the system. Employees can access their PAR history to verify pay, awards, or effective dates. It’s all about making the PAR process transparent, efficient, and secure. That’s how we help agencies go from just surviving to truly transforming their HR operations.
Learn more: Watch the demo to learn how to initiate a PAR in Workday and how Workday enables efficient personnel and position management.