Innovative Staffing
In this post, I wanted to share my two cents on HR implications coming out of an analysis my colleagues and I undertook in order to provide some recommendations to the Deputy Ministers Task Force on Public Sector Innovation. My colleagues John Kehoe from the Privy Council Office, Cedric Jean-Marie from Canadian Heritage and I were tasked to look at the various innovative staffing initiatives across the Government of Canada with a view to identifying which programs and initiatives could be scaled up to meet policy and program objectives. We selected 15 programs and initiatives that have the objective to identify talent as a way to engage the right people, with the right skills, in a timely manner to advance Government of Canada priorities.
1. Talent Cloud
2. Free Agents
3. Surge Team
4. Impact Canada Fellowship Program
5. Career Marketplace
6. Micro Missions
7. Advanced Policy Analyst Program
8. Interchange
9. New Directions in Staffing interface
10. GC Entrepreneurs
11. Intern Officer Development Program
12. Federal Internship of Newcomers Program
13. Recruitment of Policy Leaders
14. Post-Secondary Recruitment
15. Financial Officer Recruitment and Development Program
However, when comparing our sample of 15 programs and initiatives we quickly found this to be a challenging task for three main reasons:
· There are dozens of niche programs focusing on specific groups, lengths of time, etc.
· Some of these programs are only in their infancy stage versus those that have been around for decades, and
· The data available includes quantitative information, such as the number of people going through these programs year after year - though this number is sometimes only a guess or is inaccurate. There is no real qualitative data on the impact and outcomes that these programs have on career development and their effects on the delivery of services and programs across the public service.
We still carried on anyway.
When looking at the bigger picture, there is an ecosystem of innovative staffing initiatives that exists across the Government of Canada. We mapped out a few out of the much larger sample and quickly identified some similarities and differences.
We were able to group these similarities and differences into three streams: the Gig, the Tools and Platforms and the Development. In the Gig world, for the most part, you have a series of teams of talent that are able to be dispatched to work on a particular problem or in a particular organization for a specified period of time.
Then you have the tools and platforms world that enable movement of individuals in and out of government whenever there is a specific need to be addressed.
Finally, you have the development programs. We are all familiar with these, and often times the differences among these programs relates to the classification(s), or categories of employees, they are trying to target. These initiatives, among the others out there, are enabled by the New Directions in Staffing, which allow for hiring managers to more easily hire the talent they need.
Now, as a relatively new public servant with about 5 years of government experience, this seems like the ideal workplace given the amount of different opportunities that might exist for me in order to grow and develop my career here in the public service. Yes, but …. this system only works if everyone knows about all the different programs, initiatives and development programs that exist out there. Before working on this project, I knew about maybe a handful of these different initiatives. That’s a big problem. How can we scale up something that is working if people don’t know about their existence or if they work?
And so, we need to assess and evaluate current programs! Definitely easier said than done. But given that there is some overlap in what some of these initiatives are trying to achieve, why can’t we consolidate some of them? Or make 2.0 versions of them? There is nothing wrong in letting a program run for a couple of years to see how it is working, and then assessing and re-designing some components based on lived experience and elements that worked or didn’t work. It should be common practice to evaluate programs and regularly adapt them to the changing needs of government.
This can also be tied to the need to increase awareness. How do we let new employees know about the various initiatives and platforms available to them? How do we encourage current public servants to take advantage of career development opportunities and of the possibilities within and outside government? How do hiring managers know of the various processes available to them to hire someone with specific skills for a defined period of time? There needs to be some sort of centralized repository where both employees and managers are able to identify their needs both from a demand and supply point of view and know what their options are. We created this Clover mock up to suggest what a potential platform could look like.
All in all, the staffing process in human resources is something that we should all feel passionate about, mainly because at some point in our career we will be faced with some of these challenges as we too try to look for new opportunities to grow as public servants to better serve Canadians.
What do you think?
