What the mobility??
As a GC Entrepreneur (GCE), I have the privilege of spending time learning, thinking, and questioning the status quo. The best part? I get to do it in multiple teams made up of talented colleagues from across government.
During the past few weeks, the GCE’s newly-minted mobility team (@lucasdixon_, @SpaceMinh, @JulienAB_Can, and I) have had a chance to spend some time learning and thinking about the mobility of the Government of Canada’s workforce. Mobility seems to be the buzzword of the day when it comes to human resources (HR). It appears to be the HR equivalent of blockchain: none of us is quite sure what it entails, but we’re all pretty sure we need more of it.
Our team plans to draft a paper that attempts to unpack and make sense of it all. Recognizing that we are far from experts in the field and that there are many ongoing initiatives in the workforce mobility space (Talent Cloud, Career Marketplace, Free Agents, Interchange Canada, New Directions in Staffing Initiative, and the Impact and Innovation Unit’s Fellowship Program, to name a few), we will shop our paper around for comments with internal and external experts and stakeholders. We hope to offer a fresh perspective, highlight ongoing efforts, and, if it makes sense, propose new initiatives that might help the Government of Canada get the right people to the right jobs at the right time.
Our initial research revealed that the assumption that the GoC needs “more mobility” may not be sound. In fact, less than a decade ago the Public Service Commission (PSC) of Canada carried out a Study on the Mobility of Public Servants with the goal of addressing the challenges caused by high employee movement.
The PSC estimates that 4,533 new indeterminate appointments, 11,805 promotions, 15,941 lateral moves, and 14,390 acting appointment (> 4 months) took place in 2015–16 alone. The GoC also runs dozens of specialized recruitment and development programs, many of which encourage mobility. Public servants are clearly moving around, yet there seems to be an underlying sense that we have a mobility issue.
Our working hypothesis is that an increase in the right type of mobility could lead to increased employee retention, productivity, and organizational effectiveness for the Government of Canada. We have yet to fully understand this right type of mobility but we suspect that it goes beyond planned work rotations that support the career development of small sub-sets of employees. Rotational programs are great, but we are interested in system-wide mobility patterns and identifying specific initiatives that have the potential to improve outcomes for employees, departments/agencies, and Canadian citizens.
To help us get started, we are looking for data that can tell the GoC’s current mobility story. Although our search has just begun, we are finding it difficult to dig up recent data on the movement of employees in, out, and around the federal public service. The PSC’s Staffing Dashboard was a good source but a new version has not been published since the …erm, change… in our…erm…central pay system. That means that the most recent Staffing Dashboard estimates are from 2015–16.
As far as we can tell, those estimates did not capture key sources of mobility for federal public servants: internal assignments within a home department, secondments across departments, and interchange in and out of government. These mechanisms are often treated as financial transactions rather than staffing actions and are therefore not reflected in pay records. I have personally been on internal assignment since April 2016 (first with an infrastructure program and now as a GCE) but my pay record would likely show me in my substantive position as a finance officer.
We are aware of advanced HR analytics capacity within individual departments and some ongoing efforts to consolidate business analytics platforms across departments using the same HR management systems. We are now reaching out to you, friends and supporters of the GCEs, HR professionals, and data wizards, to see if you know of other sources of mobility data. Are there ongoing efforts to consolidate data from various departmental HR systems? Do you have access to other data sets that could help tell the GoC’s current workforce mobility story?
We could use all the help we can get so please feel free to leave advice, questions, or research references in the comments section below. You can also reach us via Twitter.
Thanks for reading!
Ismar
