The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has issued a draft copy of its Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2012 – 2016. The Congressionally-required plan discusses 13 benchmarks that the EEOC will use to measure how well it achieves its three main performance goals: (1) combating employment discrimination through strategic law enforcement; (2) preventing employment discrimination through education and outreach; and (3) delivering excellent service through effective systems, updated technology, and a skilled and diverse workforce. According to the EEOC, the revised plan will require "significant changes in the agency's approach to fulfilling its mission."
Because the strategic plan is still under review, several of the EEOC's performance measures have yet to be determined. For example, one of the EEOC's goals for improving strategic law enforcement is to bring a certain number of systemic discrimination cases – where a "pattern or practice, policy, and/or class" is alleged to exist within an "industry, profession, company, or geographic area." The number of such cases has not yet been identified.
Other goals include:
- Implementing a social media plan to improve its outreach and education efforts by the end of 2014;
- Revising all compliance manuals, fact sheets and Q&As with "plain language" by the end of 2016; and
- Implementing a new quality control system for investigations and conciliations to improve the discrimination charge process to "ensure appropriate pre-charge counseling, streamlined services, and better responsiveness to customers throughout the process" by the end of 2016.
The EEOC specifically wants to reduce the time it takes between learning of a charge and determining its course of action, so that it may "ensure that the agency can focus the bulk of its attention on pursuing charges of discrimination with merit."
The EEOC acknowledges that several factors, including its operating budget, will affect the strategic plan's implementation.