Antonia T. Harris joined the Department of Education as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Resources in February 2020. Ms. Harris has been charged with enhancing the Department’s human capital management program.
Prior to joining the Department of Education, Ms. Harris served as the Chief Human Capital Officer (CHCO) for the General Services Administration (GSA) from June 2014 to February 2020. During this time, she was responsible for GSA-wide policy and oversight of all aspects of Human Capital Management including: talent acquisition, development and sustainment, labor and employee relations, performance management, compensation, strategic workforce and succession planning, executive resources, diversity management, data analytics, among other things.
During her tenure at GSA, Ms. Harris was successful in advancing HR services, strategy, technology, and operations. In her first year as CHCO, she implemented a new operating model and organizational structure for the Office of Human Resources Management (OHRM) to help modernize and streamline HR services at GSA. Additionally, Ms. Harris was instrumental in modernizing GSA’s HRIT system with the implementation of HR Links, advancing GSA’s efforts to achieve long-term cost savings and more efficiently deliver HR services to GSA and their federal customers. Her work has allowed OHRM to become a federal government leader in HR IT, human capital analytics, and human capital strategy.
Ms. Harris also championed efforts to better leverage human capital data across GSA to make informed business decisions about the workforce, including establishing a set of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to measure and track key human capital metrics and outline the shared responsibilities of OHRM and its customers to improve talent acquisition, support talent development, and drive employee engagement. Ms. Harris’ leadership in pioneering the successful development and execution of SLAs was adopted as a GSA-wide practice for all GSA mission support functions and an integrated component of GSA’s wider performance management system.
Before joining GSA, she served from 2006-2012 as the Deputy Assistant Secretary and Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Human Resources for the Department of Health and Human Services. In these roles, with more than 500 employees and a budget of $70 million, Ms. Harris provided strategic leadership and guidance for the development and implementation of human resources programs and policy for the Department. She strengthened leadership development programs, consolidated several disparate rating systems into a single performance management system for an organization of 65,000 employees, led the consolidation of several collective bargaining agreements into a single agreement eliminating inconsistencies identified across the agency.
Ms. Harris has over 30 years of national and global-level Human Resources program experience and was the recipient of the 2014 Meritorious Presidential Rank Award.